Category: Life

When I was a young executive, working downtown at an interactive marketing agency, I would take a couple walks every day from the office. In the mornings, I would walk over to Starbucks and perhaps the St. Louis Bread Company to fortify myself with a triple venti cappuccino and some pastries. At lunch, I might walk to Carlos’s food cart to get two brats, plain. And maybe another walk out to Starbucks in the afternoon as much to break the tedium of the day as to fortify myself with another triple venti cappuccino.

At some point, it occurred to me that I was spending twenty to thirty dollars each day on these excursions. During those days, we were briefly DINK (dual income, no kids) but that ended in short order, and I curtailed the excursions during the brief time I had left at the agency before striking out on my own.

So when I look at my finances and am unsatisfied with the cash flow situation or the accumulated savings, I decide to nibble a bit at the edges and look at the dollars-a-day habits I’ve picked up.

I tend to grab hold of small comforts that I enjoy every day. I justify them by saying that I’m living in the moment, enhancing the enjoyment of every day, and besides, I am earning enough money to cover the small expenditures.

Of course, if I extrapolate out how much I’m actually spending, a couple dollars a day over the course of a year can run into thousands of dollars every year.

For example, take the Duraflame logs. At Sam’s Club, they cost roughly three dollars each (less when they marked down at the end of the season and I end up buying a bunch of them). The new formulation in the brown bags (Make It A Gold Night) burns in about three hours, sometimes less. Contrast this with the old yellow bags (“Tonight’s the night”) that burned for four or five hours but sometimes would fall to a smolder only to reignite some hours later, which I can understand would be a problem for normal people who don’t have iron fireplace inserts and are not around all day. But to get through a full evening from dinner time until bed time, I’ve had to burn more than one of these horizontal fireplace candles which is dollars a day I don’t really need.

A couple years ago, my beautiful wife bought me a K-Cup single cup coffee maker for Christmas, and I started using it instead of brewing a pot of drip coffee. I used it because it was downstairs, where I could make it first thing in the morning without disturbing my sleeping family rather than the convenience of the single cup maker. Although the cost of the K-Cups has come down from about a buck each to fifty or sixty cents each, I was still drinking several dollars a day in the single-use packets. So I’ve wound down my current stock of K-Cups and have moved back to drip coffee. I’ve not gone so far as to buy the giant tubs of Folder’s at Sam’s Club as they tend to go stale before I use them, but it’s still cheaper. And I’ve found that my family sleeps soundly enough that I can drain the remnants of the previous day’s brew from the pot, rinse it, and start a new pot without waking them up, especially on school days where nothing wakes them up.

Sometime in the last two years, I developed a habit of drinking mineral or sparkling water (fizzy bubbly) in the afternoons. I blame the visit to the Mountain Valley Water store in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which we visited on vacation in 2017. A lot of the material on the walls there touted the health benefits for athletes, and I wanted to look like one at the very least. Or perhaps I picked up the habit when we did the Whole 30 diet a couple years back. Regardless, I traversed the San Pellegrino, Mountain Valley, and Perrier brands. Most of these waters is sold in 750 milliliter bottles for a couple bucks each, although I could get one liter bottles for about the same price at Lucky’s Market before it folded. But I was drinking between one and three of these bottles a day for a cost of between three and eight dollars total. You know, the water coming out of our well has minerals, too. So I’ve gone off the fizzy bubbly for the nonce, which is kind of unfortunate–I kept my hydration up because going to the bar and pouring a glass of water into a fancy glass was a ritual, whereas drinking from the tap happens when I am thirsty is not and is less often. And with less gusto.

So I project to save plenty of money restricting these habits LIKE A SPARTAN!

It’s still nibbling at the edges of our expenditures, though. Our top line expense is tithing and other giving, which is more than our mortgage or car payment. I’m not giving up our martial arts school, although some months in sport seasons it’s more of an aspirational goal than something we actually attend (ditto the YMCA membership and the second gym membership somewhere that my beautiful wife often carries). I’m not going to stop spoiling my beautiful wife (my expressive love languages are gifts and acts of service, donchaknow). We still eat out too often and eat well when we eat in.

I don’t think we’re actually seeing much savings overall currently, though, because this cutting back is happening at the same time we’re laying in extra supplies just in case. Things which we will probably not actually eat but will instead donate to the local food pantry in a couple of years.

And, to be honest, this faux austerity is only going to last a little while until I start wanting a little guilty pleasure during the day because I work so hard or something. And then they will creep up and accumulate, and in a couple of years, I will clamp down again. I’m a binge fiscal responsibilitier. If Dave Ramsey were to meet me on the street, it would go something like this:

So you’re probably no better off taking financial advice from me than investment advice.

But if you’re looking to cut back, perhaps you can find some dollars-a-day things in your life.

Look at this antique pasta I scored at the grocery store. It was in the very back of the product slot.

May 1822, brothers. I’m going to list in on eBay and see what I get.

Brian J., were you taking the last bundle of pasta because you’re stocking up for the coronavirus pandemic?

Ssssssh, gentle reader. Hopefully I am stocking up to donate these foodstuffs to the local food pantry in a couple of years.

Also, my locally owned grocery chain, feeling pressured from the new Walmart Neighborhood Markets and Hy-Vee, runs a little thin on the inventory at all times, so the stock on their stocked shelves doesn’t reach very deeply at the best of times and can look a little like panic buying has occurred on the day before the new load comes in. On Thursday, for example, they had vast empty space on the bread shelves where sandwich buns go, so it looked like there had been a run on them. But hotdog buns and sliced bread were solidly stocked. So maybe the weather last weekend lent itself to more grilled burgers than the ordering algorithms had anticipated.

So one doesn’t have to stock much up to clear them out of a product. I do it routinely in buying my beautiful wife’s favorite chocolate, which I ensure we have a good backlog of in case of emergency.

When I give you an investment tip, gentle reader, I’d recommend you short it.

As I mentioned, I bought Limited Brands (L) when it brought Victoria’s Secret (Intimate Brands, Incorporated / IBI) back in house (and I had bought IBI because it produced a product I like).

So when I learned that a new lingerie shop was opening in town:

The Battlefield Mall announced a new lifestyle apparel retailer is coming soon.

Aerie, owned by lifestyle clothing and accessories label American Eagle Outfitters, offers teens and young adult shoppers alike a wide variety of undergarments, active apparel, loungewear, swimsuits, accessories, sleepwear and more. Most recently, the brand has been applauded for promoting body positivity and female empowerment through its campaign #AerieREAL.

I bought a stake in AEO immediately.

And I’ve lost 10% on it already.

I am such a child of the 1980s that I keep pouring small amounts of money into traditional brick-and-mortar mall stores, but it’s not worked out well for us. For much of the last decade, I expected retail sales to take off when the economy rebounded. However, it has not been so good to most of my holdings.

I’ll have to take matters into my own hands and go to the shop to buys lots of product for my beautiful wife.

Although my efforts to bolster JC Penney’s by actually shopping there has not worked out so well. But, hey, I have bought some good shoes there.

Every time I’ve come around the corner from my office to the den this week, I’ve seen a cat lying on the sofa.

And then I am instantly weirded out because it’s not one of our cats. And then, milliseconds later, I remember what it is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go right now and put that game controller away.

“It’s highly unlikely,” I responded. “Good night.” And I put out his light.

He might have been looking for certainty, an assurance from his father that everything was going to be all right. Perhaps some parents do that for their children, apply absolute answers where statistics indicate a small chance exists, but I’ve never been that parent, and he’s gotten similar answers whenever he’s asked about bad men breaking in, fires, or the various other real world concerns he’s expressed in his thirteen years.

When he was afraid of monsters, though, he got a certain answer: Monsters can’t get you because our cats eat monsters.

I wish I could have offered him more certainty than that, but he’s becoming an adult now, and he needs to learn risk assessment and how adults deal with something unknown, scary, and possible but unlikely.

A pandemic threat hits me right in the primal fear. Personally, I think it’s from reading The Andromeda Strain when I was young and getting the willies from it and later reading The Stand and being part of the nineties zeitgeist that had a bunch of films about pandemics (Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, Virus, and the miniseries version of The Stand). I’m not sure I’ve actually seen any of those films, but when I was twenty-something, diseases were breaking out all over.

So I have a tickle of fear when I start hearing about epidemics of deadly infectious diseases. We were scheduled to go to Disney World around time of the hyped 2014 Ebola outbreak, and I considered cancelling our plans because, hey, where are a lot of travelers who might be carrying an airborne version of Ebola going? Florida.

I did not cancel, of course, and I’ve gotten a little less jumpy (internally jumpy, gentle reader; I do so try for the stoic ideal in demonstration anyway). I have considered this month When is it too early to keep the children from going to school and to cancel our vacation plans?

The answer, of course, is now. Although if it ever gets to be too late, I will wish I had acted on my paranoia sooner. It’s a rough life, being paranoid and lazy.

But I do think that this “outbreak” is overhyped, that the novel nature of it make it more newsworthy than the flu but it doesn’t look now like it’s anything worse. Perhaps it is; perhaps I am just scanning the headlines with unwarranted skepticism and reserve.

So my message to my children about how an adult handles, erm, concerns about things outside of his control such as COVID-19:

• You don’t know the number of your days, so live each one as best as you can and always say “I love you” to the people you love.
• If you’re concerned about future events, lay up some supplies that you can later donate if and when you’re feeling comfortable. Of course, it’s always a good idea to lay up some supplies even when you’re not concerned.
• Laugh at what you fear.

  

  Of course, this will come off as insensitive to people who are losing loved ones to the disease. As you know, I have some family members who are of an age to be at real risk for dying from coronavirus (or the seasonal flu). But I am the kind of unfeeling person who makes inappropriate jokes when his own mother lies in the ICU and the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral. So I can separate my laughter from my mourning. And, apparently, my fear of infectious disease.

So that’s the behavior I model for my children, anyway. I hope it comforts them in its consistency.

Apparently, Facebook thinks I have just turned Golden Corral age.

To be clear, I am not yet Golden Corral age. Although I have been known to eat at Village Inn during the happy hour.

The night before last, my wife read something to me that had the word “bungalow” in it, and I said that you really don’t hear about bungalows except in California.

Then, yesterday, someone linked to and quoted an article about black families leaving Chicago, and the first paragraph is all like:

Hardis White, 78, could hardly wait to break out of suburbia.

He dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans and a Bears cap, strode out of the rectangular bungalow he shares with his wife and daughter and folded his tall frame behind the wheel of his silver Nissan sedan.

So I was all like, wut?

So I read up on bungalows and learned more about the architectural style. There’s even a Milwaukee bungalow style, which I’ve undoubtedly seen a bunch of.

But I guess I read a lot of detective fiction set in California where vics, perps, and sometimes detectives live in bungalows. Which is why I was mistaken.

But a reminder that sometimes this little Internet thingy can be a force for education and not just political poo fights.

So we attended an archery meet this weekend, and a kind of gawky looking kid came in, and I said to my beautiful wife, “I just walked in the door.”

This thought proved delightful not only to my wife, but also brought forth a belly laugh from the teacher whose son was shooting on the same lane as the lad.

I was a thin, gawky young man. Here I am at eighteen at my high school graduation party in May 1990.

I was only spared the heavy glasses because advances in contact lenses meant they could now (that being 1988 or so) correct severe astigmatism and because, for some reason, my sainted mother sprung for said contact lenses when I was in high school. We never were very flush with money, so I cannot ever understand why she sprung for them. Were they something I got in the summer when I went to my father’s home in Milwaukee and got all my dentistry and medical things taken care of under the aegis of his union benefits? That’s more likely.

At any rate, a commercial for Kia that aired during the Super Bowl features football player Josh Jacobs wondering what he would say to his younger self:

As this is a football player, the advice is to have faith in the football.

I expect my message to myself might be different.

Have faith, young man. Although you cannot put any weight on now no matter how much you exercise or how much protein powder you choke down, eventually you will be able to put on muscle if you want. In thirty years, you could go from an adult medium to a 2 XL, you can spend lots of time in a gym, and you can listen to heavy metal whilst doing so. Which could very well make you assume some of the characteristics of the very young people who torment you now.

You can marry a beautiful woman, have a couple of good kids, and pursue an interesting and lucrative and well paid career and yet be vaguely unsatisfied with it. You might spend much of your time restless, hoping for something better, kind of like you’re rushing through these teen years. Instead of focusing on tomorrow and the next best thing and growing up, you should spend today with your brother and your mother and your family because someday too soon they won’t be with you any more.

You know, I could give my younger self the same advice I give my contemporary self, and I’d probably heed it just as little.

Forget that other castle for sale.

I want this one instead:

A castle tucked away on 2,400 acres, visible to the outside world only from water or air, is on the market for $24.75 million — more than twice the asking price of any luxury property for sale in the St. Louis area.

It’s being touted as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to own a private estate that includes a furnished castle with a conference center and an 18-hole golf course, according to the listing by Cushman & Wakefield real estate firm.

Union Pacific has for more than 30 years owned the nine-bedroom, limestone mansion with a gun tower used in the Civil War. The railroad used it as a corporate retreat, but in 2018 decided to close it to cut costs.

I’ve read about this property from time to time in history books and whatnot, but I never thought I’d have the chance to own it.

Which depends upon me winning the lottery. But, still, like buying a lottery ticket gives you one chance where you had none without it, the property being for sale gives me a chance where I had none when it was not for sale.

Well, no, I guess I’ve always had the chance of societal breakdown leading me to becoming a regional warlord and using it as my headquarters. So maybe I have two chances now.

You can view the property listing here.

Spotted on a door of a shop on Historic Main Street in St. Charles:

Click for full size

An envelope taped to the shop door that says Confidential for Owner.

I cannot imagine what the envelope might contain. A note about the sale of the building with information about the new owner for the lessee? Information about the local protection racket and rates? A thank you card for a great gift purchased within?

Although it would have been very, very easy to have taken it and read it, I am not the owner, and I ain’t got no truck with no MacGuffin.

But taping something with that label to the door seems like an easy way to make sure that the confidential note does not get to the owner.

So on Christmas Eve, the oldest son and I had some time to kill. My beautiful wife and youngest son were playing trumpets for the service, so they had to go to church early to practice. As the oldest son was only the acolyte and I was but an attendee, we had an hour between our traditional early dinner out and that church service, so we stopped by the Barnes and Noble.

I picked up a Lee Child novel, as you know. I also picked up a couple magazines: 2600, a couple of writing magazines in case I have a New Year’s Resolution of writing more, and the latest copy of Metal Hammer magazine.

I mean, I’ll need something to read on the plane this summer. It’s not like I’ll dive right into it–I tend to pick up magazines and then get to them later. Sometimes much later.

When my wife and son returned home from the second evening service, I had pies in the oven and the magazines on the desk in the parlor. When my wife saw what I’d bought, she gave me a look.

Because, as I discovered the next morning, she’d been at Barnes and Noble herself that week and bought that very issue for me for Christmas.

Which left me with two copies. I had the receipts, so I could easily return one for the $15 (!), but instead, I chose to give it to one of the instructors at our martial arts school. This gentleman not only leads classes, but has been in charge of musical selections to listen to during the class. He has played Leo Moracchioli, for crying out loud. Although, strangely, he plays the hardest rock for the children’s classes, and we adults get 80s hits for some reason.

Hopefully, this issue will inspire him to put more Jinjer and Ghost on the playlist for us adults.

So I’m not going as far as saying metal is family, but he was pleased with it. Enough for two fist bumps. And in a later class, he chose me to help demonstrate a drill whereupon he punched me several times. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

I’m kidding a bit, but it was a nice thing to make an unexpected and unprompted gift. Off the schedule of the normal gifting holidays and whatnot. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to unexpectedly brighten other people’s days.

Well, it’s not to the actual people. It’s to the Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Foundation which:

The Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Foundation was founded in 2006, originally called the VIVO Foundation. The charity was created in an effort to financially support young people in “life-changing experiences designed to broaden their global perspectives,” according to the Foundation’s mission statement. Change lives it did- since it’s [sic] creation, the charity initiative also provided countless scholarships for minority college students and youth worldwide, as well as worked with the Make a Wish Foundation.

I am sure someone could count the actual scholarships, but that’s beyond modern journalism.

As far as donating, thanks, but I have my preferred and mostly local charities I support.

• Republic Pregnancy Resource Center
• People Helping People
• Convoy of Hope
• Salvation Army
• Feed My People
• Nurses for Newborns

Not all are local and not all are local to me now (Feed My People and Nurses for Newborns are in St. Louis, not far from places I’ve lived). I also support three or four Friends of the Library organizations, the Wilson’s Creek Battlefield Foundation, and the church, but I am leery of large national organizations and sports figures’ organization, and organizations with nebulous goals. I’m also not a fan of giving in response to a triggering event (a death, a disaster) but recognize they do prompt other people who don’t give as a matter of course.

That’s my charitable philosophy. Not that you asked. But I’m sure if you click one of those links above, you can find a way to give. If you are the sort you responds to a triggering event or blog post.

As I mentioned, this week marked a milestone in my life: I am older now than my father ever was. He died a month short of his 48th birthday, and it’s now less than a month until mine.

I would have preferred to pass this occasion in the peak of my manhood, but my current job and parenting schedule has limited my trips to the gym and martial arts school over the last year, and I don’t have any GAINZZZ nor MAINTAINZZZ THE ZZZZTATZZZ QUO to report. I think I’ve melted. And, to top it off, I am dealing with a sports injury that will require at the very least a trip to a specialist if not surgery to correct (or, perhaps, “Your insurance doesn’t cover it, so I can only prescribe that you stop martial arts, weightlifting, running, and triathlons, old boy.”).

You know, I sort of always think of him as older than I am. Middle-aged. But I guess that makes me middle-aged.

I cannot imagine him–my father, not my doctor–as an old man, though. I mean, there are a lot of older gentlemen at church, and I can’t even imagine my father at that age.

Also, a shout-out to Disabled American Veterans, who this week sent a donation solicitation addressed to my sainted mother.

Who passed away almost eleven years ago–the anniversary is creeping up on me–and never lived at Nogglestead. But keep trying, you algorithm-based mailing list builders.

So my oldest son played Destiny 2: Shadowkeep the other night and didn’t like it because it was too hard–which means different from the first person shooters he’s accustomed to.

As my beautiful wife and I ate dinner, I mentioned to her what he said, and then I thought of Shadow Chasers, a short-lived television series from the eighties that could have been a comedic blueprint for the more successful The X-Files.

I hadn’t thought of this show in years. But the Shadowkeep brought it to mind.

Almost as a non sequitur, my wife said, “In 2052, we’ll be eighty.”

It would almost be a non sequitur, and it might have seemed so to her, but I corrected her. “Shadowrun is set in 2050.”

Although she was not a big roleplaying gamer back in the day–or a television watcher who would have seen one of the eight episodes of Shadow Chasers that aired–our martial arts school is in Shadowood Plaza, and I have told her at least once that the name of the plaza reminds me of Shadowrun. Which I never played, by the way.

So we really hit for the cycle on geekery: Video games, esoteric television, role playing games, and martial arts based on the word “shadow.”