Sonicrusk Blog

I recently had a birthday and it gave a chance to again marvel at how well women pick gifts.

I remember my dad telling me about how his girlfriend bought him a gift for some special occasion. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember him telling me that it was an item he mentioned to her in passing several months before. She remembered this fleeting comment and bought it for him. A similar story, just last year I had a conversation with my mom about how I’d like to get a down comforter. A few months later, she bought me one for Christmas.

Speaking of Mom, she was interested in how my girlfriend would celebrate my birthday. I guess it is telling. My girlfriend, who will from here on out be called Sarah on this blog because that is the pseudonym she picked for herself, asked what I wanted for and to do for my birthday. I really had no idea. I have no imagination for special events unfortunately. That’s why I’m the Beverage Keeper for holidays. I didn’t have any idea on where to eat. Plus, I had to work the night before and this conversation took place just a few hours before I had to report. I’ve had some bland birthdays in the past. Two times in my life I’ve started crappy jobs on my birthday that only lasted a couple of weeks. I worked a twelve hour day shift on my birthday last year. One time, I spent my birthday travelling from Texas to California by personal auto for an army change of duty station.

I picked Sarah up at her house and she greeted me at the door with a gift bag featuring the monkey with a banana hat that you see above. She suggested we eat at Outback Steakhouse where we had a damn good chicken meal. Before eating, Sarah wanted me to look at the gifts she had bought me.

Sarah does have a woman’s keen observation skills when it comes to gift giving. I mentioned that the day before my birthday she had asked me what I wanted. Lately, I have been watching old Columbos on DVD because I thoroughly enjoy them. She has even watched quite a few with me. I already own seasons 1,2,7,8. I told her that I’d like season 3. She visited several different places before she found the box set and gave it to me as a gift. She also bought me two boxes of Milk Duds, my favorite candy. She gave me a cute card of a guy dancing in a hologram.

I have lots of magnets on my refrigerator that I’ve collected over the years. She gave me one that lists interesting trivia from my birth year. Last week, I saw some blank cards with cool designs and pictures at Border’s that I liked when Sarah and I went looking for a cookbook. I didn’t buy them because they were kind of pricey at $3.25 a piece for an impulse purchase. She bought me four of them. She also bought me a couple of postcards, one with a thumbs up she liked and another with a picture of Elvis Presley’s record “Love Me Tender.” She said it reminded her of a story we watched on 17 News about a lady that decorated a high school bathroom with Elvis memorabilia. She also bought me a gift certificate to Starbucks because she knows I like coffee.

These were incredibly thoughtful gifts and it almost made a tough guy like me choke up. I hope that I can get her something(s) later this year that are even a fraction as thought out.

This is a test to see if I could use the Snipping Tool on Windows Vista along with Windows Media Player and Irfanview in order to capture screens from a DVD. This is William Shatner as Detective Lucerne.

I bought my new computer a few weeks ago. After the purchase, I ran some errands with my dad, one of which was to stop by and do something for my aunt. Upon telling her about my very recent big ticket purchase, she was surprised that a “skinflint” like me would make such a grand purchase.
 
What is a skinflint? A frugal, parsimonious person, a miser. What can I say? She’s right. I don’t try to be frugal, or even “cheap.” It just so happens to be the case. Saving money has always been easy for me. I make few big ticket purchases. I’m not going to Pier One to buy fancy lampshades or whatever the hell they sell. Even when I was a college student for several years making virtually no income, I still wasn’t in debt.
 
Forever and ever, money just piled up for me. When I was 14-years-old, I saved up $800 that I stored in my dresser drawer. This was in 1989, 1990, and the most that I brought in for income as a weekly $25 for babysitting my siblings during the summer. A big ticket purchase to me back then was buying a pizza from Domino’s. In the army, I saved up a large nest egg that I found quite impressive. It was a tidy sum that nearly got me through all of nursing school when I was only getting the GI Bill per month. With nursing, what took me four years to save up in the army, I saved in one year.
 
Maybe I was a miser as a kid. Around the time as my $800 nest egg, I used to ride my bike to Long’s Drugs or Vons to buy a 2-liter of soda pretty much everyday. When I came home, I’d sell it to my siblings for fifty cents with the following caveat: they had to add six cubes of ice from the automatic ice maker in the freezer. Mind you, I bought this 2-liter of soda for probably under a buck back then, and now I was selling a cup for fifty cents. I stuck by it too. My brother or sister, or at the time stepbrother or sister, would have no money or would complain to a parent. My parent would ask me to reconsider and I would refuse. It was my soda, wasn’t it? If they wanted a big soda, they shouldn’t spend their money on dumb stuff as soon as it entered their pockets. My parents couldn’t argue with my principle. So, my siblings would cough up the two quarters or sometimes, my parents would cough it up for them. It didn’t give me a very good reputation as it turned out. My whole family still holds that ritual against me.
 
Like I said earlier, I don’t consider myself overly cheap. I spend when it is needed but I rarely lend. People that require loans are usually not in a position or mindset to ever pay them back. You have to hound them and they always portray you as an asshole for doing so. Still, I’m glad that I don’t require that BMW in order to be happy, although I wouldn’t mind owning a Cadillac someday.

I recently had a computer death in the household.

I’ve been lucky enough to never have a computer outright crash on me, and I should feel lucky that it happened at this time in my life. Do malfunctions like these ever come with any type of warning? Even cars act like shit before you get the diagnosis of “head is cracked” or “blown rod.” Car killing diagnoses where the repairs would equal to a nice down payment on a new vehicle. Automotive heaven after that.

So I went to turn on my computer one day and heard a beed-a-beep-beep. A little flashing light on the front of the computer. The mouse wasn’t moving that well so I went to Target to buy a new one. That one didn’t work so well either, so I took it to my webmaster to see if he could fix it. He pronounced its death. “It involves the motherboard.”

He let me borrow a computer for a week before I could go shopping for a new one. It’s funny how I spent basically the same amount on this computer yesterday as I did for my very first in 1999 with this one being literally 100 times more powerful. I don’t remember the specifics of that first unit, but I had something like 4-8GB of storage space if I was lucky. The new one has 640GB. Plus, I bought a 500GB external hard drive.

This new unit has Windows Vista. People poo poo Windows but it is what it is. Vista - very nice interface and more modern looking but a bit convoluted so far. It seems to allow a download of Firefox or Gmail Notifier, but doesn’t show me where it is stored or if the download was even successful, yet doesn’t tell me it has failed.

My keyboard and mouse are wireless which is cool. My last computer was four years old so it didn’t have these capabilities.

My pursuit in spending 100-dollar coins ended a couple of days ago. It showed me that I am boring and spend cash in only about a dozen different places, most of which are located no more than five miles from my house.  I consider myself frugal, and yet I still spend money on frivolous bullshit.

Last weekend, I spent five coins for a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin breakfast. About twelve hours later, I gave eight coins to a co-worker so he could buy me a Jack-in-the-Box meal.

I later bought some more microwaveable dinners at Green Frog with another eight coins. For the grand finale, I was off of work two days ago. I bought a scrub shirt with twelve coins, a car wash at Cruz Thru with five coins, and the remaining fourteen coins went to Albertson’s for assorted groceries. All gone.

I don’t think the US Mint has done a good enough job of publicizing these new coins. Most people that I gave them to made some type of positive comment. “Ooh, are these the new ones?” Even the cashier at Albertson’s liked them, and I gave him fourteen. Even my co-worker didn’t mind getting a handful of shiny doubloons for a Sourdough Jack combo meal.

I miss my coins. Last night, I went to the ATM and now all I got are a bunch of ratty bills.  I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I should spend the coins all summer.

I had a whole weekend off about a month ago so my girlfriend spent it over at my place. I was sick and not able to do much. Sunday rolled around and I had to take her home. We put it off until about 10:30 at night, but she did have to get back because she had to work the next morning. I was sad because it felt like the whole weekend had been pissed away. I told her how I have never liked Sundays. She said it’s because Sundays are for goodbyes.
 
She is right. Almost nothing good comes of Sunday, God forgive me. As a child, my parents were divorced. Sunday meant leaving the fun weekend spent with one parent to return to the boring monotony of life with the other. It also meant a return to school. Vacations always end on Sundays, whether work or school. I have no fond memories of the last day of any Summer Vacation as a child, and they always fall on Sundays. Even as an adult, vacations always end on the same day of the week because most people work the conventional Monday-Friday job. Both Labor Day and Memorial Day are on Sundays. Mother’s and Father’s Days are on Sundays. Explosive fun and then back to the grind. Ugh.
 
As an adult myself, I can’t think of how many times during college where I was sitting at my computer writing a paper all day on a Sunday. Sure, to some Sunday equals football. To me, it just reminds me that baseball season is over and that depresses me even more.
 
TV sucks on Sundays. Megachurch telecasts all morning, and then pure shit TV at night. Al has a couple of old David Letterman clips from the 1980’s. As a kid, I lived for Johnny Carson and David Letterman when I stayed up late during vacations. There was no TiVo, or DVDs, or Internet to past the time, only a handful of television channels. Back then, on Sunday nights, there was sometimes literally nothing on a channel besides a test pattern. You’d be lucky if news played all night, especially if you didn’t have cable. Back then, before Fox or even when Fox was new, all the Big Three stations would play some crappy Movie of the Week from 9-11PM on Sundays.
 
While we do have many more choices nowadays, Sunday night TV still goes to shit after the 11 o’ clock news. Sports bloopers and infomercials. Actually, that’s about how it was when I was a kid.
 
I remember when I had Sundays and Mondays off while in the army in Germany. It meant that I couldn’t get a haircut on either of my days off. Barbershops are closed Sundays.

Slow splurge day today.

I spent three coins at the hospital cafeteria for breakfast. The old lady cashier did study them, a look she usually wouldn’t give ratty dollar bills or crisp $20s fresh from the ATM. She then plopped them into the cash register tray.

Later in the day, six coins were spent at McDonald’s. This is where I’ve received the best reaction so far. The young girl cashier must be a closet coin aficionado. “Oh, these are the new ones!” she effused. She then told me how she trades them out for paper cash whenever a customer uses them for a food purchase. She said that if she needs to buy something that costs two bucks, and if she only has one-dollar bill and one-dollar coin, she just won’t buy it. Interesting. She will probably have my coins hidden in her drawer very soon.

Fifty-six coins remaining. I might be out of town this weekend. In that case, the dollar coin splurge will be put on hold until my return to Bakersfield.

EDIT: Fifty-one coins remaining. I bought a fancy coffee at Supreme Bean this morning with five coins.

The splurge continues.

I spent eight coins at a local Green Frog market buying microwave dinners for my lunch at work.

I exchanged one coin for a dollar bill with a co-worker so that I could buy a soda from a vending machine.

I gave a co-worker one coin so that she would do vital signs on one of my patients for me.

I spent two more coins buying another cinnamon roll at the same donut shop as yesterday. Damn! I might spend the remainder of the coins on a cardiologist.

Sixty-five shiny coins remaining.

I started spending my dollar coins, burning through almost a quarter of them in half an hour.

$7 went to a small East Bakersfield convenience store for a fill-up of gasoline. The total spent was $36, but I had $29 in paper currency. There was even a two-dollar bill in there.

$1 went to an East Bakersfield donut shop for a large cinnamon roll. Very good.

A whopping $15 went to dry cleaning. I have a wedding to go to this weekend, and had to get some slacks and dress shirts cleaned.

Seventy-seven coins remaining.

I was at the bank a few weeks ago withdrawing a massive amount of cash prior to my last Las Vegas trip. It was several hundred dollars, and I needed some smaller bills and $1s for tips and such. Anyway, the teller was a trainee, her preceptor sitting on a stool behind her. After receiving my paper cash, I asked if they had any dollar coins.

“Sure,” the teller responded. She proceeded to tell me that she had quite a few actually in rolls of 100. Wow. I asked how many loose coins she had. She had about fifteen and I took ‘em, spend them in various places around Bakersfield and Las Vegas, Nevada. They were the new coins, shiny and lustrous with John Adams on the front.

Now, readers of this blog know I love most things denominated such as stamps and coins. For some reason, my OCD kicked in, and I thought about getting a roll of those 100 $1 coins and chronicling how I spent them here on this blog. So I went to the same bank branch this morning and got some. My memory must be faulty, as they aren’t rolls of 100 but actually rolls of 25. I was thinking of spending them around town to either spread the dollar coin love or as a low-level practical joke on merchants. Maybe I’ll put my mark on them like SR or SB. That way if one ends up in your hands, you’ll know that it came from Sonicrusk’s crazy scheme involving dollar coins. It will also give you a glimpse into how I spend my money as well as make it easier to stalk me.