So there’s a thing going around Facebook where you are supposed to list ten jobs, nine of which you have done and one of which you have not. Gentle reader, as you know, I have held many, many jobs in my life as I have a degree in English and Philosophy, and that leads one to a vagabond life of chasing an extra quarter an hour until you trip into a career. Or it did for me, anyway.
At any rate, I cannot do a Facebook share-your-personal-information schtick without subverting it, so I posted this:
Let me explain.
These are job declarations in Job Control Language, one of those inscrutable but efficient programming languages that run on Big Iron, that is, mainframes and whatnot.
You know, I’ve never programmed in that language, although there’s probably still plenty of jobs for programming Big Iron around. My rejoinder on Facebook is going to be that it’s the 21st century, man. But the last statement is not a job, it’s the invocation of a job library. Or something.
I know a couple of old programmers who might get the joke. Strangely enough, my sainted mother had to run JCL commands at her last government job, so she might have gotten it. But probably nobody else.
It’s so obscure that it made me laugh out loud, though. Sad!
Also, I want to remind you, gentle reader, why I do not play in these cut-and-paste-games on Facebook:
I think I’m going to make my children transcribe and research everything from “We Didn’t Start The Fire”:
When I was in high school, the last couple of days of the Honors Western Civilization class featured a video that covered the 20th century. For extra credit, we could turn in our notes from watching the film. I transcribed the lyrics to this song (because we did not have the Internet, gentle reader, and either had to go by ear or by the tiny liner notes in the cassette case).
Although I did not actually turn these notes in, a friend of mine took them and turned them in. The teacher, of course, had no idea.
Last night, I was telling my oldest child about how my grandmother used to take my brother and I out of school for a day once a year, and she would take us different places in Milwaukee. She took us to the Milwaukee Art Museum, but she did that more than once and more than on the day with Nana because she managed the gift shop at one point and could get us in without charge. She took us to the Milwaukee Public Museum which had the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. She took us to the downtown library, where you could check out an Atari 2600 and a game cartridge for blocks of an hour (and I foolishly picked Space Invaders, but my brother picked E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, so you can guess that was a long hour for us).
And one time she took us to see the dolphin show at the Public Natatorium. In Milwaukee. Probably in the winter.
We didn’t actually see the dolphin show; as it was a school day and we were the only kids in the audience, the dolphin trainer had us come help with the show. So we held up fish whilst the dolphins leapt and held up the hoops the dolphins darted through. Although after the end of the show, I was feeling comfortable with the dolphins and reached for it, but the dolphin chattered in a way that scared me, so I backed off.
I told my son the story, and then I went to the Internet to back me up on this.
OnMilwaukee has stories about the public natatoria built in Milwaukee in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries which include the first indoor pool in the United States. The Old Milwaukee blog has the rest of the story about how entrepreneurs briefly turned the last of the natatoria into a destination restaurant with the dolphin shows.
Fun fact: In the middle 1980s, when I was 13 or 14 years old, I was addicted to the tabloids. Not the National Enquirer which had celebrity news. I spent far too much money on Weekly World News and The Sun which had the crazy, unreal things in them. Like Bat Boy.
I would have better served myself in spending that lawn mowing money on comic books or blowing it on the Rampage machine up the hill at the U-Gas.
So my mother-in-law gives each member of the family a wall calendar for Christmas, but over the years, I’ve found that although I hanged it on the office wall, I didn’t really write anything on it as appointments go on the family calendar (generally, the one she gives to my beautiful wife) that hangs in the dining room. I often found that I was months behind in turning the pages of it. So last year I reclaimed the wall space (to hang the Hirschfeld print and a Packers-themed wallhanging Christmas gift from my mother-in-law to be named later).
Which is why this year’s calendar is still in its wrap. I have it placed atop the bookshelves near where it would hang were I still to hang it. And as I was performing my biannual (or is it biennial?) office cleaning, I saw it and noted something awry with it.
365 interesting things in a year with 366 days.
Clearly, the cover designer was not paying attention.
I have not cracked it open to see if a day is, in fact, missing its remarkable people, extraordinary events, and/or fascinating facts.
Because clearly this misprint will be a collectors item someday.
Yesterday, my beautiful wife picked “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost for our daily poem.
I thought of the perfect film for it:
The Ice Pirates starring Robert Urich between his stints as Gavilan and Spenser.
Yes, it was on Showtime in the middle 1980s. Yes, I did watch it over and over again whilst confined to quarters, which in the middle 1980s was a 12′ by 60′ trailer, and I wasn’t supposed to go outside when my mother wasn’t home during the work week.
Although I have it on DVD, I am not sure when I will watch it with the boys. Mostly because I don’t want to have to explain what a Space Herpe is. Or, worse, not explain it and have to explain to another parent why my child called her child a Space Herpe.
So every day of this last week, their first at home because of the coronavirus lockdown, the boys and I (and sometimes my beautiful wife) have taken a poem and hand-copied it to keep up with our handwriting and to talk about poetry. We started with “If” by Rudyward Kipling, and apparently it’s a thing now because I’ve seen it on a couple different blogs (here and here this very week). I was going to have them do “The Gods of Copybook Headings”, but it’s pretty long–“If” took the slowest writer an hour (complaining included).
So we did a couple of shorter poems–a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, “Ozymandias” by Shelley on Friday.
Continuing the theme of Romantic poets writing about ancient Asian things, yesterday we went with “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
After about an hour (including complaining), we finished. We talked about the rhyme scheme, the meter, and the way the poet uses strange contractions to make meter. I mentioned that Coleridge is best known for writing the Iron Maiden song “Rime of the Ancient Mariner“.
And then we watched the film version of the poem.
I told my beautiful wife I had just picked it up. Wherein “just” in this case means three years ago.
My wife and youngest son watched the whole thing with me; the oldest son wandered off, and when he returned, he asked what was happening, as though it was making real sense between the Olivia Newton-John numbers. We told him it would have made more sense if he hadn’t missed the animated interlude in the middle. Which was not true, but.
Today, I think we will continue our mythology unit with the 1980 Clash of the Titans.
Confession: I did select “Kubla Khan” just so we would get to watch the movie thereafter. There, I said it.
My father was born in the Baby Boom generation to a family of carpenters and outdoorsmen, gentle reader, so as I grew up, I was pretty sure he knew how to do everything. He could build a house, repair or rebuild a car, survive in the woods on his own, and so on.
Of course, my parents divorced when I was a pre-teen, my mother got custody, and we moved to Missouri, so I really didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him in those years where I could have learned a lot of things like this from him. You know, useful skills. Not that it would necessarily have done any good, though. I did live with him during my college years, and I didn’t take the time to absorb what I could have then, either, as I was busy working or studying (just kidding) or trying to frame myself as a poet and writer who would eventually be a big deal in New York or something. Anyway, to cosmopolitan for anything like working with my hands.
I am probably retconning a bit to be harder on myself than I need to be here. After all, I worked retail, warehouse, and printing jobs through those years and into my immediate post-college career, so I wasn’t as genteel as that. However, I did not learn a lot from my father when I could have.
So I received a little note this week from my grandmother in Wisconsin along with an enclosure.
It’s a poem he wrote in 1966, high school or perhaps his first year in the Marine Corps. It’s before he met my mother, as she did not enter the Corps until the next year. Maybe it was for the girl girl who gave him this sweater. Or another. He was a handsome young man, a football player in high school, and popular with the girls. Although my grandmother had it, so perhaps he wrote it for her.
Apparently, he could write poetry and had nice handwriting to boot.
So here I am, older than he ever was, and I still have to find a way to equal him. Although I’ve got him on years married to the same woman. I think he topped out at eleven years twice.
As I have mentioned before, in the days before cable and the Internet, you really had a limited selection of things to watch, and we watched Hercules and Hercules Unchained on Saturday and Sunday afternoons along with a whole host of peplum. Although I remember the Sinbad movies as well, but it looks like those were not products of the 1960s but the 1970s. And a whole bunch of Zorro.
I like recapturing those Saturday and Sunday afternoons when I find a film like this one at some yard sale or another and watching it, sometimes with my boys (who don’t mind the old films so much since I’ve inured them to it with viewings of old films like The Iron Mask and National Velvet).
And then I do a little research and learn tidbits of trivia (“research” means I read the Wikipedia entry for Steve Reeves) and learned Internet truths like he was the highest paid actor in the world in his day and that he was considered for the roles of Doctor No and The Man With No Name.
Neat stuff.
But, clearly, I am not watching the old films as fast as I thought I would at the beginning of last year. Perhaps the coronacation will allow me to catch up a bit.
She didn’t ask me; I don’t have a business or life coach. She asked this of my beautiful wife the other day, and my wife asked me last night while we watched the sunset.
I remember Joe DuBois asked me that in 1998. We were standing at the old timey semicircle sink, washing up after a day of running printing presses, and I told him I did not know. I mean, back then, I was five years out from college, and I told him that I hadn’t expected to be working as a printing press operator five years from then.
It’s pretty clear I’ve never really been much of a planner. My wife, on the other hand, does, so this question is right in her wheelhouse. She likes to plan out the week to come on Sunday nights, including the nights we’re staying in (all of them these days) and what we will eat for each meal. She likes to get a little more granular than that, but when the week unfolds, something always comes up which derails the weekly plan. Someone has a homework emergency. Work runs long. Or something. These variations stress her out a lot at times, whereas I am able to better go with the flow.
If I skip ahead in five year segments from my conversation with Joe, I would find myself working at an Internet startup that I hoped would make me rich. Five years later, I had been an Executive and had just struck out on my own as a consultant, but mostly was taking care of my two children. Five years later, both my kids are in school, and I’ve taken a contract with another startup that I hoped would make me rich–my billed income was certainly high, and I thought the sky was the limit (until my accountant calculated the annual tax increase, which sobered things quickly). I’d also started training in martial arts after my boys did. Five years later, my consulting work had gotten stale, and I took a full time position that’s not as swashbuckling, to say the least, as being an independent contractor. Five years from then, which is only three years from now, I’ll have a high school graduate and high school sophomore and…. Who knows?
If we reel back in the years in five year increments, we can see what I was blogging about on this day in history.
To be honest, that’s what the blog is really about: Giving me the ability to go back to a point in time and see what was going on in the world and in my life at the time. You, gentle reader, are just along for the slow-moving ride.
And where ever I am five years from now, I’ll know how I got there. But I’m not sure where that is, nor am I sure where I would want that to be.
So the spellchecker in the browser here does not recognize the spelling of coronavirus yet, which is a nice thing.
On Tuesday, we had a project manager for a local contractor out to re-bid replacing the gutters at Nogglestead. The current gutters, many years or decades old, can no longer handle the deluge that comes with severe spring thunderstorms. I had the same fellow out to bid last year, but we didn’t have it done for some reason–I got busy or something. At any rate, the price was the same, so I put down a deposit on it. Sometime in the next week or so, a team will be out to put my new gutters on amid the panic. After he took my check, the project manager held out his hand to shake mine, and I felt like a dandy germophobe in not clasping his.
I went to Sam’s Club yesterday to top things off in case some time in the near future I won’t be able to. The hours have been trimmed, and I got there about an hour after the store opened. I can’t give you an apples-to-apples comparison of the same time period on a normal weekday, but it wasn’t terribly crowded. Cleaning products were limited to two per SKU as were diapers and whatnot. The laundry detergent was mostly gone. The meat department and produce department were a little light, but I managed to get what I needed. I managed to hit the checkouts as everyone else did, but I remembered I wanted to pick up some sushi for lunch, so I went back, and when I got to the registers a second time, the lines were minimal.
We have been staying in more than normal, with only one trip out some days (Sam’s Club or the recycling center). Today, my beautiful wife is going to visit a 92-year-old woman who just joined her choir. When she first showed for choir, she forgot where she parked, and my wife drove her around the church parking lot looking for her car. So the new choir member made an afghan for my wife, and she wants my wife to pick it up today in spite of the current unpleasantness.
Five of the last six days have been overcast and rainy, with only yesterday warm and sunny. Spring always catches me by surprise. This year more than others. But a cool, rainy spring last year led to our best peach crop ever, and the trees are starting to blossom now. I hope we’re not going to get another freeze, but it is definitely possible.
So that’s the story. Life goes on, especially for the people who have to go to work somewhere that’s not in the service industry. It might even seem more normal for the people who still have to go out to work every day than it does for those of us in the professional trades who sit at home alone but for the Internet headlines and rumors for company.
Good luck out there in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Remember to eat your neighbors first while they’re still plump, before they start getting thin from starvation, and only then dip into your stockpiled beans.
Now that I’m dispensing financial advice to your detriment, gentle reader, I want to let you know in on a little secret I learned back in the old days, before the macarenavirus, when my son and I could freely travel to the YMCA for a triathlon class in advance of a triathlon sure to be canceled now.
After class, we went to the vending machines to get a Gatorade. The price listed on the machine said $1.50, and it had a credit card reader, so I used the credit card to buy a couple of drinks.
When I checked the credit card statement, I had a pair of charges for $1.60. When I checked the machines again, I saw the fine print: The price reflects a ten cent discount for using cash.
Well! I never! Well, no, I rather too often!
So I have decided that I’m going to save that ten cents each drink and pay with cash from now on.
One thing to note about me is that I don’t tend to carry coins out of my house. We have a little mite box for the Lutheran Women Missionary League, a little receptacle for change that you can bring, once a month, to church and dump into a larger box. So whatever change I accumulate in my pockets goes in there when I unpack for the evening.
Now I do try to generally be frugal with my pocket money as I will, if given the opportunity, stuff it into some collection plate or another. So I get a twenty out of the ATM once or twice a week, and then I promptly stop by the doughnut store. As a matter of fact, I tend to get that twenty just to buy doughnuts. My order comes to $4.76, and the proprietor gives me a quarter and three fives in change. If I have a dollar, I’ll tuck it in the tip cup. If not, sometimes I tuck in a five (a tip jar is a sort of personal collection plate, ainna?).
So when I get to the YMCA, I have a wallet full of five dollar bills. Two of the machines dispensing Gatorades do not take five dollar bills (apparently, the only “cash” allowed is coins or one dollar bills). One of them does, though, and we get a Gatorade and change paid out in three Sacajawea dollars and two quarters. Two quarters and a Sacajawea buy the other, and I have two dollars left.
Two dollars in coins.
You already know what happens next: I get home and put the change into the Mite Box.
So I’ve essentially spent two dollars to save twenty cents.
Fiscal responsibility really isn’t my strong suit. I have an English and Philosophy degree, friends. Not accounting. I would have said “economics,” but we know that’s not a study of money so much as manipulating people into doing what the economists want.
An ad that appears often on sites that know how to thwart (or pay off) my ad blocker:
I haven’t watched the video to see whether it is a yoga thing or not, but I am pretty sure that I’ll not look as eye-catching and clickable as the ladies in the ads if I do any kind of stretch you would find on the Internet.
Time will tell, though, as I got my beautiful wife who favors yoga pants gift certificates to the local yoga shop for her birthday, and someday when the air is clear again, we shall use them.
In the interim, though, I’ll be doing her bidding in the garden and getting the back pain that I’ll need to cure.
I predicted even before the macarenavirus troubles began that a dying time was coming. As you know, gentle reader, my aunt and godmother died on Thanksgiving. Her illness and the age of the previous generation led me to my unhappy musings.
Yesterday, the best man at my wedding died of a drug overdose.
I had met Mike in high school where he was a year behind me. We had a Spanish class for a year and got to be acquaintances. When I went away to the university, Mike was one of the people to whom I wrote (letters, not emails, as I am far older than most people who use you.regettingold.om). We shared an interest in poetry and exchanged poems (printed on computer paper as we did have computers back then, you damn kids, but not the Internet, really). When I came back on break my senior year, we did coffee house open mic nights and poetry slams together, and we did that throughout the middle 1990s along with some roleplaying games and trips to GenCon.
We started parting ways toward the end of the 1990s. I got a girlfriend, and he got married, and although the house I rented with my new bride was only a couple blocks from his, we didn’t see each other as much because we were married men or something. He wasn’t even my first choice for best man; I think I slotted him for second runner up or usher, but when my first choice for best man decided he could not, in good conscience, stand at my wedding (and another groom’s man stopped talking to me), I gave him a battlefield promotion to best man. And he did it well.
We didn’t drift apart after that; sometime after I moved out to Casinoport, he stopped returning my phone calls. The last time I reached out to him was November 2000, when I left a message in Spanish on his machine (voice mail was on tape recorders or locally hosted computer chips back then, gentle reader) to invite him to go see Bedazzled. He never called back.
Although I would have called him my best friend back then, in retrospect I’m not sure how good of a friend he really was. He was, erm, good with the ladies. He was handsome, smart, athletic, and appeared to have self-confidence in bunches. So, yeah, he was with a lot of ladies, including a number of women in whom I was interested and told him so. He used drugs and kept that hidden from me because he knew I would disapprove. He definitely showed me what he thought I would approve of, so I’m not sure who he was.
He called me up in early 2008. A mutual friend, the other of my groom’s men who bailed on me over a philosophical argument of some sort, had reached out to him after a decade, which prompted him to call me to apologize for the break in our friendship. He told me that, back in the day, I was such an ass that he would have to tell other people before meeting me that I was an ass and that he got tired of having to warn people about me. He told me a bit of what he was up to, but he never asked me anything about how I was or what I was doing. I was an executive downtown, and we had a baby, and I lived in Old Trees, not far from one of his obsessive flames and one of my crushes (two different people) that he slept with lived. I was bursting to tell him if he asked or if he even seemed interested, but the call was about him, not me.
So the fellow who was to be my groom’s man but stormed off after the philosophical argument reached out to me yesterday to let me know that Mike had passed. I understand he had substance abuse and mental health issues that followed him into middle age. That he pushed away most of his remaining friends. I was just talking about him with my wife not long ago, but I hadn’t felt compelled to reach out to him.
The service is on Thursday night, but it’s in St. Louis, so I won’t make it. It’s funny, for someone I haven’t talked to in a long time how this has affected me. Perhaps because I thought we were such good friends once, but I was later not sure (so, Brian J., why don’t you trust anyone, including your own judgment in people?). Maybe because he was a peer and one of the first of my youth cohort to die that I’m aware of. I don’t know.
Sadly, so many of these death posts are about how I feel about it and not a roaring tribute to the deceased. But I am an egotist and a recovering ass, so it’s par for the course.
Wally lived in the projects at the other end of the block from us, but he would shamble down 40th Street a couple times a day, probably on the way to the grocery, drug store, or liquor store on Florist. He was ancient to those of us under ten years old. He had white hair and no teeth, and he moved slowly. I was never sure if he was infirm or intoxicated, but he would always happily comply when a group of children would surround him and request his rendition of “Tiny Bubbles”.
I was talking to my brother a couple weeks ago, and he mentioned that Wally served in World War I. Doing the math, I guess that would work out–he was about eighty. My grandfather served in World War II and was only a little older than I am now in 1970-something.
What stories Wally (and my grandfather) could have shared with me. Probably not about the wars, as men of those conflicts didn’t talk much about it, but just the things they had seen in the early part of the 20th century.
It’s probably why I like self-published personal memoirs like The Apple Man and Growing Up In The Bend. I get to hear those stories of ordinary men in their own words, without having to actually talk to them (or risk them with various infections).
Another good reminder to live in the present with those around you instead of tinkling on a blog or banging your head against a promise chain for hours a day.
So I have quietly begun to accumulate Tommy Reynolds and his Orchestra (Your Band Of Tomorrow) records. And by that, I mean I have snapped up the inexpensive copies that I have found on eBay. I’ve got nine so far, including some that are not on his Discogs page.
That’s right, I have been watching for items on eBay, which is unlike me. Mainly, I like to get my records for a buck each at the book sales. But I am hunting down Tommy Reynolds stuff on eBay.
I even have a 16mm film reel of his song “Smiles”:
I mean, the video guy has it to make my own DVD copy of it. You see, in the middle 1940s, the Mills Novelty Company made Panoram machines that played short reels of film, generally musical numbers, and you could put your nickel in the Nickelodeon sorry, that’s a different thing entirely. You could put your money in and see a film performance of a song. Music videos before MTV, children. So I’ve got my own copy of a film I can’t watch natively, and I’m hoping to stumble across other Tommy Reynolds titles.
Why, Brian J., are you so into an obscure big band?
Because my Cousin Tat sang with that band.
You might remember Cousin Tat as the doctor who did not know who Fred Thompson was. To be honest, at that time, that’s about all I knew about him, too: that he was a doctor, and that he could pray in Hebrew.
He passed away in late 2008, and it was only at his memorial service that I learned the measure of his legend.
He sang with the Tommy Reynolds Orchestra. He was an Anglican Bishop. He was the head of one of the Cherokee nations and visited 10 Downing Street. He was a medical doctor and professor who married an attractive, much younger student (my mother’s cousin, so Tat was really my cousin once removed by marriage). He owned a series of clinics abroad that specialized in nutrition and longevity treatments not approved by the FDA here in the states. And he was a nice man, a humble man.
Although the research I’ve seen on the Internet does not show any known recordings where he is credited with vocals, I’m grabbing up everything I can from the Tommy Reynolds Orchestra just in case I can find something with my cousin on it.
Side note: One of the best things about coming from a large (that is, normal sized for the early 20th century) family is that I’ve pretty much got a cousin who has done it all. I’ve got a cousin that sang with a Big Band in the 1940s. I’ve got a cousin who sang with a heavy metal band in the 21st century.
Yesterday, on the way home from school, one of the young lads informed me we needed to go to the dollar store to pick up…. Something. It’s for his Learning Fair project, which is a paper, a trifold board, and a presentation that they (the boys) annually produce before spring break to show the grandparents (who have a special day at the school right before spring break).
He did not know to say “Report cover” and made it sound like he needed sheet protectors. But I remember from years past that they needed report covers.
“I think we have some of those at home,” I said.
Apparently so.
I am not entirely sure why I have dozens of report covers. Did I inherit them from my aunt? Were they on sale? Did I expect to write more reports than I have or expect my boys to need more than one a year?
Not depicted: Another package of six that wasn’t in the bin with the others.
So we didn’t need to stop to buy one (or fifty). And at the pace we’re using them, neither will our grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
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.
