How to fix a dimly-lit refrigerator

Answer:  As near as I can tell, there is currently no practical solution to this predicament.  Let me explain our attempted workarounds in the sections below so that you won't waste your own time trying the same approaches.

Do you find it a bit odd that everyone acknowledges this issue but no manufacturer has seen fit to correct it??

Yes, yes, I know what you're going to say - this falls squarely into the category of "first world problems".   

It's a first world problem but you might be surprised at how much food (and therefore money) I waste because I can't properly see what's in our fridge.  Our kitchen is in the center of our house and has no windows - it isn't very bright to start with, and light coming from our unusual kitchen skylight and our standard pot lights doesn't illuminate the fridge.

I think what happens is that manufacturers design the lighting without accounting for the food load.  In this example, there is no light whatsoever getting to most of the shelves in the fridge on the right.  

Here's the source of all this aggravation:

Each of us homeowners pays upwards of a thousand dollars for a refrigerator, but a lot of them only come with these crappy little bulbs.  Unfortunately, those obsolete bulbs make retrofitting very difficult, especially because they are so small, with correspondingly small sockets and low wattage.  

My first instinct in dealing with this problem was simply to wait until our 10-year-old refrigerator eventually died of natural causes, because surely a newer replacement model would be brighter??  But I recently went on a pre-purchase shopping trip to look at new fridges, and found that none of the models currently for sale would be bright enough for my dim-kitchen, severely-myopic needs.

Our fridge takes three of those 30-watt incandescent miniature atrocities.  Sigh.  

So upon discovering that new fridges are not significantly better than the one we've already got, we set about trying to resolve this.  We first looked at specialty bulbs.

Don't laugh, but I actually do use a flashlight to search our fridge!!  We could find no specialty bulb on the market that was measurably better than what we've already got.  This is a sampling of Amazon reviews for an LED fridge bulb model that sells for $15 apiece.  Given that I would need three, I could spend $45 on these things and still be no better off than I am right now.  

We initially thought we could achieve partial relief through adaptation of a compact fluorescent in the largest of the three bulb sockets.  

The CF bulb on top, is an "instant on" 14 watt, 900 lumen bulb (intermediate base), so it actually is compatible with the fridge.  You can see here that it looks brighter than the lower two 30 watt bulbs combined.   EXCEPT...

...CFs don't do well in the cold!!  The "instant on" feature did not save it from dimming out as soon as it got chilled.  It ended up being worse than the original incandescent.  

So here is the fridge light summary of failure:

1. The incandescents are not bright enough
2. The LED options marketed to replace the dim incandescents are not bright enough, and
3. The CFs start out being bright enough, but cannot maintain their lumens at 38 degrees F (not while operated only intermittently, at least).  

So where does that leave those of us who are fumbling around in the dark?  Pretty much screwed until technology improves.  Once again, I've essentially written a place-holder post here, a post that I'll come back and update when a better product hits the market, when I discover a reasonable hack, or when someone drops me a comment or email relating a solution that finally will put me out of my half-blind misery.

How about a danged light bulb that is actually fit for purpose?  That would be enough to satisfy me.  

How to manage a special diet on a long road trip

Conversely, this post could be titled "How to enjoy a week at the cottage without having to cook".

Answer:  Consider incorporating the following simple equation into your vacation food management strategy.

A diet that is largely freezer-based (see this humorous post and this other post) PLUS a Yeti Tundra cooler to keep items frozen over an unprecedentedly-long duration of time EQUALS a whole lot less hassle for the traveler, especially if the traveler happens to be their family's chief cook and bottle-washer.  

As we found out during a recent 3,000-mile (one way!!) car trip, the Yeti is a game-changer for consumers.

That is one loaded-down minivan, but stuff-dragging is inevitable if you're driving your family cross-country.  Retrospectively we realized that we should have put our Yeti 50 (at upper left) squarely above the rear axle, because it was very heavy.  In this photo we had it pushed too far toward the rear of the van.  

In our case, it wasn't a special diet per se that prompted me to try this food management approach, but rather the following two considerations:

1. We were rendezvousing with other family members for the proverbial cottage-by-the-sea vacation, and I wanted everyone to be able to sample some of the home-grown goodies that I harvest from my gardens here in Houston.
2. More importantly, I was looking for some relief from my aforementioned chief cook and bottle-washer status.  Does this ever happen to you?? -- You travel to some lovely cottage in an idyllic remote location only to spend half your "vacation" time mired in the logistics of how to feed everybody.  Typically, 'idyllic remote' means two things:  not many services to start with, and those few that are available are extremely expensive.  So it is with our annual cottage destination, which largely caters to the resort crowd rather than to middle-class travelers.  Your options in that scenario are as follows:

• Pay sky-high prices daily for nutritionally-unbalanced restaurant meals (unacceptable)
• Admit defeat and eat chicken nuggets and french fries most of the time (unacceptable)
• Take your own home-made food along for the ride (ideal if you can find a way to preserve it long enough)

We had heard about the Yeti's superior cold-retention capability but we'd had no previous experience with it, and Yeti itself hedges its bets where longevity guarantees are concerned.  Here is how we tackled our food transport challenge, and the results:

• A few days prior to our trip, we bumped our freezer temperature down to the lowest it would go, which was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
• About 12 hours prior to the trip, we packed the Yeti with ice to "pre-cool" it because we had read somewhere that this would help with cold retention.
• On the morning of departure, we dumped out the pre-cooling ice (which had partially melted), quickly loaded the cooler with our food, and then carefully packed new ice (cooled to below freezing) into the void spaces.  

Here is an ice-free view.  Most coolers are elongated, but I chose the Yeti 50 because it is closer to being cube-shaped - maximum volume for minimum surface area.  As I described in this previous post, I only use Pyrex ware for food storage, and by this time we own approximately 120 Pyrex pieces of various sizes.  The Yeti 50 can hold about 12 to 16 one-quart Pyrex containers and perhaps 4 to 6 of the 2-cup size, depending on your desired ice-to-food ratio.  That's a whole lot of food!  

• We continued to monitor the ice throughout our long journey.  Here's the kicker - we weren't going directly to the cottage.  We spent 9 sight-seeing days on the road before we even got to our final destination.  By Day 7, some of the ice had begun to melt and the frozen food was beginning to thaw, but we re-packed any void spaces with new ice daily to keep the temperature as low as achievable (properly refrigerated frozen food generally has a shelf life of 7 to 10 days after initial thawing).  Then, as soon as we arrived at the cottage, I cranked down the refrigerator to its lowest possible temperature in order to maintain the thawed food as long as possible.

And the strategy worked very well, indeed.

Mexican pork and squash stew (recipe here) and Cuban black beans (recipe here) three thousand miles from the point of preparation and ten days after having been removed from our freezer.  Served with brown rice.  

OMG - I WENT ON VACATION TO A COTTAGE AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY HALF-CENTURY LIFE, I DID NOT HAVE TO COOK!!!  All I had to do for each day's main meal was to prepare fresh rice or pasta, warm up my home-made food, and set the various dishes on the table to be served.  In this way, I fed 5 adults wonderful meals for 7 consecutive days with almost no effort.

And here's the added bonus that I neglected to consider at the outset:  What would the corresponding price of 35 high-quality restaurant dinners have been in an expensive area?  Or conversely, cooking 35 person-meals from scratch by buying ingredients at substantially inflated local pricing (not to mention the incredible amount of time and energy that would have sucked out of my vacation time)?  Yeti coolers are not for the financially faint of heart - our Yeti 50 cost almost $400.  But if you do the math on this scenario, what you'll conclude is that the money saved by bringing food 3,000 miles substantially offset the purchase price of the cooler.  Effectively, the thing almost paid for itself in one trip.

Marvelous, I tell you.  I had no idea at the outset whether this scheme would work, but it was successful beyond all my expectations.  And I have never enjoyed my own cooking more than after a succession of absolutely grueling, miles-long mountain hikes.  It tasted twice as good as it normally does.
:-)

The additional possibilities are substantial:  Gluten allergy?  Medical condition?  Losing weight and don't want to experience the type of inevitable set-back experienced from being forced to eat whatever crappy food is typically available while traveling?  Try a Yeti - it might work for your situation.

As always, this is a noncommercial post expressing personal opinions only.  I receive no compensation from any referenced source.  In those cases where cited manufacturers have felt compelled to furnish me with products, I donate them to charity.

An average rating of 4.9 out of 5 on more than four hundred reviews?!  That kind of phenomenon almost never occurs in the consumer universe, but I can see why it did with this product.  Five stars, indeed.

Screengrabbed from this Academy website.    

FIOS failings, Part 3

My February 24, 2014 post about how Verizon is not delivering guaranteed FIOS speeds got lengthy with updates, so I'm starting a new entry here to describe an apparent recent change in Verizon's tactics where contractually-owed refunds are concerned, because this might be of interest to those of you who really deserve to get your money back.

Past 6 p.m. on any given Friday evening, I've learned to expect this kind of thing.  Like many other Verizon customers, we are paying for 50 Mbps, but routinely receive only a tiny fraction of that. The class action lawsuits can't move fast enough for my taste, but in the meantime, I believe we are owed refunds for service not delivered.  

Back in early 2014 when my irritation with this issue first compelled me to take up the battle with Verizon, I could call them and say, "You are not delivering your guaranteed service and so you need to credit my bill accordingly" and they would do that.  But what I noticed two days ago is that they seem to be developing new and more elaborate stalls and red herrings designed to alleviate their financial obligations, even as evidence of their bandwidth throttling continues to mount.

Let me explain.  Friday represented my NINTH service request to Verizon for the 2014 calendar year.

Yes, you read me correctly.  Nine times.

Meme generated by others referencing the 1986 classic "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", which I saw at a theater that no longer exists, but it used to be located in the parking lot near the Clear Lake Bed Bath and Beyond.  

For the first time on this past Friday when I called in, the CSR tried to tell me that my slow speeds were my fault rather than Verizon's.

First they gave it the old college try with the "Your own wireless connection is slow and is causing your problems" routine.  To which I reply every time, "I don't use wireless".  I normally have to fight with them before they'll believe that, during which time they try to trick me into admitting I'm using wireless (because everyone does, right?), when in fact I have the bluest ethernet cables ever manufactured running to all my machines.

This is not, and has never been, my problem.  This is one of the reasons we chose to build our own house - so we could run about two miles of Cat 5 everywhere we wanted.   

Having exhausted that possibility, they then proceeded to claim that my speeds were slow because Windows 7 Professional was causing my problem.  Humoring them temporarily, I allowed the CSR to commandeer one of my machines and download this third-party software which he believed with all his heart and soul would fix my issue once and for all.

See the yellow squiggles highlighting the check boxes?  Those were made by the CSR as he was driving my machine.  I screengrabbed this for reference.  The product is TCP/IP Optimizer from Speedguide.net.  

The use of this product had no effect on anything, however, as Windows wisely seemed to deny it permission to make registry changes, even while running in Admin mode.

But of course Windows was never my problem to start with.  But that didn't stop Verizon from trying to toss me a grenade a short time later.

Um, no.
In a word, NO.

"Grenade" as I understand it is a term from back in the computing dark ages.  A "grenade" is a routine inserted to blow up a running process.  If I had not replied back, they would have cancelled my service request with no further action on their parts.

I've noticed this more and more with Verizon - if they text you and you don't reply, they close your ticket irrespective of whether your problem has been solved.  If they phone you and leave a message and you don't reply back immediately, they will automatically close your ticket.  Of course, they tend to phone during business hours when normal working people have restrictions on when they can place personal calls.  

In order to get my refund this time, apparently I have to follow through with a technician service call that is scheduled for tomorrow (Monday).  Apparently one cannot simply ask for refunds any longer based on the strength of the evidence.  Apparently one must now endure considerable hassle which seems to be designed to make pursuit of compensation not worth one's while.

Sigh.

As you contemplate that, take a look at this three-minute video posted by another disgruntled FIOS user just 24 hours before I made my latest service request.  As I said at the outset of this post, the evidence supporting intentional manipulation continues to mount (HT:  this Consumerist article).

URL:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vs3QhEx_3w

Embed:

What's wrong with the USDA Myplate?

Answer:  The federal government's ChooseMyPlate campaign compartmentalizes food choices in a way that is no longer realistically attainable or reflective of prevailing American culture.

People really did eat like this a hundred years ago when 39% of American people worked on farms (virtually all of them family farms) and this kind of food assemblage was readily available to them, with most of it being in fresh, palatable forms.  That number of workers has since fallen to 2% and the farms that they do manage are mostly factory farms and monoculture installations where you wouldn't find much taste in the end product even if you were to harvest a bit of it for immediate personal consumption.  

Screengrabbed from this USDA site.  

OMG, that looks like PRISON FOOD!!  This is an example of what I mean by "no longer realistically attainable".  Yes, you can "attain" a situation in which you've procured all of the elements of the USDA plate.  However, each and every one of them shown in this picture is highly processed - the bread looks mass-produced, the fruit looks canned, the meat looks pressed, and the green beans have been cooked half out of existence.  You can tell just by looking at the photo that none of those components have much taste.

Screengrabbed from a "post my plate" contest announced by Oregon State University.  

One glance at that pic above and it's easy to understand why so many folks choose junk food over USDA's suggested "plate".  It's simply not realistic to expect people to eat the likes of that for as long as there are other more satisfying (if profoundly less healthy) choices available.

Fortunately there is a workaround.  All you need to do is "think outside the wedge" and capitalize on the best information that is available to us here in the 21st century.

Sambar combines the nutritional intent of three plate wedges into a single dish.  Recipe here.    

Where that sambar is concerned, some folks may wonder why I'd choose to post such an exotic and somewhat challenging recipe instead of something more "American".  The answer is, because Americans have historically done a crappy job of leveraging the value of vegetables and legumes in their style of cuisine.  Most Americans envision vegetables as being something boiled or steamed and simply topped with a bit of butter and salt.  That worked, taste-wise, a hundred years ago when vegetables were maximally fresh and non-factory-farmed.  But because of the situation in which we now find ourselves, that approach is no longer workable, and therefore we need to develop a better strategy.  Asians have historically been virtuosos where the preparation of vegetables is concerned - it's a far more prominent part of their culture than ours.  They have already invented that particular wheel, and therefore it simply makes efficient sense to adapt some of their techniques in our own lives, to compensate for what we have lost through mechanized food production.

Garden porn, the stuff of the sambar pictured above.  I refer to it as "the best food that money can't buy".

My husband and I had one of those classic "You didn't disclose this part of yourself before we were married" conversations the other day.  I didn't disclose to him the fact that I was going to devote a fair amount of mental energy and time to gardening and developing recipes that make use of what gets produced in our tiny back yard.  I didn't disclose that because I myself didn't realize that it was going to happen.  I started doing a little gardening as a hobby, and all of a sudden, the positive feedback loop initiated.  Now there are plenty of days when I simply don't feel like devoting a few minutes or an hour to the gardening tasks at hand.  But if I don't garden, we don't eat the same quality of food.  My husband is 6'1" and 170 lbs.  I (at the age of 50) am 5'6" and 130 lbs.  Our teenage daughter is 5'6" and 115 lbs.  If I stop gardening and cooking, some of that benefit is going to be forfeited, not to mention the loss of the enjoyment we derive from superior food taste.  Thus far, I haven't found the trade-off to be worth it, and so I keep digging in the dirt.  

Best camera and lenses for the semi-serious

Answer:  In my opinion, it's Nikon's prevailing entry-level D-series DSLRs (currently the D3300) with both an 18 - 55 mm Nikkor lens and a 55 - 200 mm Nikkor lens (B&H currently has a good deal on the 18 - 55 mm consumer bundle).  Have one camera body dedicated to each lens if you can afford to do that (it keeps you from missing important moments because you are fumbling with lens change-outs, and it also keeps dust and moisture out of the inside of the camera body because you never have to remove a lens).

Wikipedia hosts this spectacular summary of what's on the market and what's been on the market, Nikon-wise.  I'd be lost without it.  

I get this question a lot, both on and off blog - what camera are you using?!  I see a lot of people over-buying their camera equipment because they don't comprehend what they really need (it doesn't help that popular sites such as CNET sometimes mis-identify mid-range as entry-level).  I fall into that consumer category where my intention is to do better than what a cell phone can provide, and I want to capture special moments, but I don't want to dedicate my life to the pursuit of the perfect focus.  I'm not an aspiring professional - I just want to grab great photos with a minimum of fuss, without overstepping the point of diminishing returns.  And I'm very hard on my cameras, subjecting them to a great deal of outdoor punishment, which routinely leads to shortened lifespans.  If I were to buy up, photography would become financially unsustainable for me.

And I don't see a need to buy up.  The market has come a long way in just a few years, as technology continues to evolve at break-neck speed.  I was one of the Nikon D50 early adopters in 2005, and at that time, it was considered a mid-range camera.  Today's D3300 handily outstrips the capability of the original D50, but but the D3300 is instead considered entry-level.  You could buy a mid-range package, but would you notice a significant difference in the results for your extra $500 to $1,000 investment?  To me, the sweet spot of investment remains at the entry level simply because of the remarkable recent achievements in technology.

Most of the pics on this blog were taken with the 18 - 55 mm lens, which neatly brackets the range of normal consumer experience from de facto macro to wide angle.  Here is a series of recent photos illustrating the general capabilities of the 55 - 200 mm lens.  Note that these have been cropped and downsampled to a 1024 pixel size, so the originals are much higher resolution.

Bug-eyed on the Boardwalk Bullet: If you stand on Kipp Avenue a short distance south of the Starbucks, that's probably your best vantage point for shots like this.  I took this on Sunday afternoon as I was trying to catch my family in action, not knowing when their turn would come.   

The roller coaster moves so fast that there's no time to confirm which car your family members or friends might be in - it's better just to shoot first and ask questions later.  None of my family in this one either.  

Still no loved ones appearing, but I was really impressed that this young lady's ornate hijab remained in place for the duration of her ride.  

Kemah also boasts that new upside-down ride, reportedly the only one in Texas and the second tallest in the world.  One of the enchanting things about using a basic telephoto is that picture-viewing becomes a bit like Christmas - you won't really know what you've got until afterward when you load up the pics on your computer.  My child asked, "Mommy?  Why is that guy giving the finger?"  I replied, "I don't know sweetie - apparently he was engaged in a conversation with someone on the ground."
:-) 

Of course, you can also use the 55 - 200 mm telephoto lens as a de facto macro lens in certain contexts, as this anole picture shows.  Some of the effects of doing so can get a bit otherworldly, as the light collation is tighter (more polarized) here than it would have been if I'd used a regular macro.  

They are such fearsome beasts, aren't they??  I never get sick of photographing anoles.  

A dove that came a-drinking about a half an hour ago (I often keep the telephoto on the desk beside me so that I can get shots like this without getting out of my office chair!!).

Note that I took this through my office window which is perpetually covered in dog snot because my dog tries to sniff the birds through the window pane.  Any distortion you see here was not due to the telephoto lens - it's due to the cheap plate glass window I was shooting through. And the snot coating it.   

If you are torn between cameras and lenses, look at sample pics such as those above and ask yourself:  What is it that I would have wanted to achieve in those same situations that was not achieved by those pics??  If you find yourself citing a specific answer, then maybe you've got a justification to buy up.

I have always told myself that I'll go ahead and purchase the next upper level of camera at the very point where I feel I have exhausted the possibilities of the entry level models that I already own.  I myself have yet to reach that threshold.  Good luck with your own camera shopping.

Movie mule

I got a lesson in cultural evolution last night when I took my teenage daughter and her friend to a multiplex theater to see an R-rated movie. The rating was for language only, which does not trouble me with respect to my own child, and the other girl's parent had given his permission for her to see it.  But because of "heightened security" at the theater, last night for the first time I had to actually buy a ticket and do exactly what this famous sign says:

That is, I had to physically accompany them into the theater. And of course it's every teenager's dream to have a grey-haired old woman along for the ride on a Friday night.  

See, in the Olden Days, which was all of two weeks ago, what teens would do is figure out which movies were down which multiplex hallway, and they'd buy a ticket to a PG movie down that same hallway.  And then they'd simply slip into the theater showing the R-rated movie they wanted to see in the first place.

It's a small, harmless act of rebellion.  If the worst thing your teen does is sneak into an R-rated movie, count yourself among the truly blessed.  

But now there are gestapo movie police who patrol the multiplex hallways to thwart exactly this type of subversive activity.  Which meant that I had to hustle my girls into a movie that I had no intention of participating in, which makes me a modern-day analog to a drug mule or something.  The poster says that I have to "accompany" them - it doesn't say that I have to actually sit through an entire frat house flick myself, right??  It's not my deal!!! I'm just muling these kids over the movieland border!!

If nothing else, this kind of enforcement represents a shrewd money-making effort on the part of the cinema, because it means that they're making an extra ten bucks without having a geriatric like myself proceed to actually occupy the seat I paid for.

Because, of course, they don't make enough money already.  Sigh.  

Best cross-body bag

Answer:  In my opinion, the best one on the American market to date is the Navigator Bagg by baggallini, which is available at The Container Store.

It may even be exclusive to The Container Store because I can't find it listed for sale anywhere else.

Image courtesy of The Container Store.

I will explain in detail why this is my choice, showing all the problems I had with numerous other brands.

They are not unknown in the American consumer market, but they are not as popular here as they are in Europe, which boasts a larger collection of pedestrian societies.  This makes finding a good one surprisingly difficult.

Quote screengrabbed from ebags.   

Unfortunately, my photo-documentation series is incomplete, because I've already given away more failed cross-body bags than I can count.  But here are a few shots of those that still linger unused and undonated in my closets.  If you are a cross-body bag aficionado, maybe these pics will convince you that you need to choose wisely if you want to avoid wasting your hard-earned money.

While not explicitly promoted as a cross-body bag, the "Healthy Back Bag" was one of the first on the market to claim an ergonomic-type advantage.  

I had two of them over the years and I had the same complaints with each.  The sateen fabric on this black model showed dirt really badly.  And the fabric was not robust enough for the punishment that I typically dole out to handbags.  It tended to look worn very quickly.  

Furthermore, they weren't well-designed from a compartmentalization standpoint.  Basically all my junk would end up in a heap at the bottom of the bag.  I didn't find the interior compartments to be very useful.  

Durability and design are equally non-negotiable where cross-body bags are concerned.  These types of handbags are not carried by the type of average women who may drive back and forth among their suburban homes, the grocery store, and an office job.  If you are searching for a cross-body bag, you are probably professionally-oriented, but you're no fashionista.  You're a woman who moves around a lot and who needs to keep her hands free and her purse contents within quick, efficient reach.  No rummaging around like a guinea pig in a fresh pile of wood shavings while the rest of the world waits for you to get your stuff together.

Having had poor luck with fabric bags, I moved on to leather, which proved to have its own faults.

I thought I was onto something good when I found this Fossil bag.  The leather quality was better than average and the bag was reasonably well-designed.  

A properly designed cross-body bag will have an integrated wallet compartment on the exterior of the bag - that's what makes them maximally efficient.  No digging through the purse for a wallet, prying open the wallet, rifling through the contents... you should just pop open a convenient flap and immediately access your cash and plastic.  This particular Fossil did not have a large enough number of integrated credit card slots, but I could live with that much (you can see one line of them down the center of this flap pocket).  

However, I could not live with this atrocity.  While the bag itself was a good quality leather, the straps that hold the handle onto the bag were a crummy grade of leather or vinyl wrapped around something that looked like cardboard to bulk it up.  Almost immediately, the edges frayed, revealing the cardboard-like material inside, a flaw that was basically impossible to fix without incurring more labor cost than the bag was worth.  Whenever I'd look at this, I'd recall that famous soul-crushing line from "Silence of the Lambs":  "You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?"  Well, with this mess, I felt like I had good shoes and a cheap bag.  *Fail*.  

Mmmmkay, so what did I do next??  Bought yet another leather bag.  I realize I was being a sucker for punishment but I have a very specific lifestyle and I simply need a good cross-body bag, so I had to keep trying different models.  

Unfortunately the leather on this one was not as good as the Fossil had been, and it showed wear very quickly.  I don't know what brand it is, because I bought it at DSW in the Baybrook shopping center of Clear Lake Texas, and it seemed to be no-name.  

Furthermore, it had another design flaw that quickly made it look ridiculous.  There was a decorative buckle on the front, but the buckle prong pointed up instead of down (thanks, China!).  What that meant was that, when I'd lift the bag upward from the floor or wherever, the prong tended to hook on whatever the bag brushed up against (e.g., the side of the car seat, the cushion of the couch, the person standing next to me, etc.)  So I then had to take wire cutters and snip the buckle prong off.  But between that move and the leather that wore thin quickly, I was right back into cheap-looking territory.  *Fail*.  

The other limitation that you should realize with respect to leather is the weight.  If you're a cross-body woman, you're probably on the go, zooming around on foot, physically active, and perhaps in addition to your bag you are carrying other equipment and/or small children.  Realize that you're going to be hauling around 1.5 to 2 pounds of unnecessary CG-destroying weight if you choose a leather bag.  I ended up concluding that the high-end look afforded by leather simply wasn't worth it.

My very next bag boondoggle was a nylon Travelon model.  They are advertised as offering security features because they have clips that allow you to secure the zipper pockets.  There's also a wire running through the main strap so it can't be easily cut by a purse-snatcher.   

This one offered the advantage of a light-colored interior which allowed me to see the contents more easily.  And mercifully, there were more credit card slots than the Fossil had.  

However, there were two fatal flaws.  Number one, the zippers kept letting go on me - they were (in my opinion) too flimsy to stand up to the abuse I dish out.  Number two, the thing didn't really have a good convenient pocket for a smart phone, which is the Kiss of Death where purses are concerned.  Both side pockets were too small, but I tended to cram my phone in there anyway, which made the zipper splitting problem even worse.  

Incidentally, even with all these photos, all these different brands, and all these complaints, there were still more purses that I bought and later gave away because they just didn't work.  For instance, REI has produced some wonderful cross-body bags over the years - assuming the wearer never exceeds 21 years of age, that is.  REI's handbag products tend to be durable and excellently designed, but they lack sophistication.  I'm taking my bag to corporate meeting rooms in sky scrapers on Smith Street - I'm not taking them camping.

Sigh.  Enter, finally, the baggallini.

I have yet to find a bad flaw - and obviously I'm a flaw-finder.  The nylon fabric is very durable and repels dirt. I don't just visit Smith Street skyscrapers - I have dragged this bag through some of Houston's grittiest industrial plants, perhaps as many as thirty times so far.  You'd never know it by looking at this pic.  

The front pocket is big enough even for oversized smart phones.  It closes with a magnet for one-handed opening.  

The front flap with the cell phone in it lifts up to reveal the zippered wallet feature.  There's a photo ID slot on the outside, which is really convenient for me because I often need to surrender my TDL as I enter high-security facilities.  

Here's the feature that separates the men from the boys, metaphorically speaking.  When you open the wallet, the credit card slots are on the side farthest away from you, such that you're automatically looking straight at them rather than having to lift the bag to horizontal in trying to peer at the inside wall of this pocket.  THAT took real headwork on the part of the designer.  Somebody took the time to think this thing through.   

Another stroke of genius - like I said, women who carry cross-body bags tend to be on the move and they don't fool around with life.  If they use cosmetics at all, it's often limited to the basics.  The main compartment of this bag contains elasticized holders for just the two barest essentials - mascara and lipstick.

Some of REI's early cross-body bags had lipstick loops as well.  Just lipstick - nothing else.  Because outdoorsy women will often use lipstick as their token effort at social conformism, and to heck with everything else.  

Close-up of the corner, where the wear tends to show the worst (it's about six months old in this photo, six months of heavy use).  So far, so good.  

So after untold hundreds of dollars spent over the years on other products, the baggallini Navigator Bagg is my favorite because it is:

1. Sophisticated enough for the skyscrapers
2. Durable enough for the industrial dungeons
3. Light enough so that it doesn't throw me off balance on long treks, and 
4. Efficient enough so that it doesn't leave me cursing and fumbling at the check-out counter.  

Should I later discover hidden flaws, I will update this post, but for now, this is my hard-won winner.