Sonicrusk Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A few posts back, I talked about how I seemed to have no time to write posts. I suppose that’s the case with a lot of bloggers. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this, but sometimes I feel like I put too much pressure on myself to post. Pretty soon, I build it up so much that I just say fuck it, and watch some crappy TV show or goof off on the web.

I went to Albertson’s after work one day and, among the groceries, bought an egg timer. You see, my plan is to give myself fifteen minutes to write a post. If I am still yammering on after that long, I will wrap it up. Sometimes, of course, a post must go on longer than a quarter-hour. When I talked about The Price is Right, or my NCLEX experience, those posts took one or two hours if I remember correctly.

So far it has taken me five short minutes to write the above two paragraphs. By the way, this is the first post where I have tried timing myself. Also with the utmost honesty, I will tell you that the steady tick tick tick of the timer is freaking me out. I thought that egg timers made a low grinding growl. This one actually ticks quite rapidly. I feel like my heart is going to blow up.

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Mr. Wizard died yesterday at the ripe old age of 89. Here is the intro to his 1980’s Nickelodeon show. It is pretty cheesy and aged…or is it? i still remembered every bit of theme music. I even remember the variation to the music in the closing theme.

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I saw this Russian cartoon on the Classic Arts Network, which has a lot of cool things. It’s kind of hypnotic.

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I was joking around with my girlfriend over the phone a while back. If I remember correctly, I had a series of days off from work, and wanted to sequester myself in my house. I wanted to be a poor Howard Hughes. In fact, that would be the reason to buy a house. That way, I can amble around inside of it with a bathrobe on and a big beard. It sounds like fun for a while at least.

Anyway, I didn’t want to leave my house. I realized that I had enough food, and that got me thinking about the contents of foodstuffs in my house and how they ended up there.

Confused? Well, how about this: Think about your pantry, cupboards, freezer. I was looking through my cupboard during this phone conversation. I have a can of pears that I have had for years. For some reason, I bought it, but never ate it. An errant can of enchilada sauce and Campbell’s split pea soup. What was the reason for buying the soup? Seemed like a quick meal at one time. I also have a Costco-sized box of Top Ramen Oriental flavored noodles and a similar sized box of Pop Tarts, assorted flavors.

In my freezer, I have those Tina Microwave Burritos and a Marie Callendar’s Cheesy Chicken pot pie. I don’t know what made me think that frozen cheesy chicken would taste good. I have Hot Pockets that I have had for years that I do not like but have never thrown away. Has it been years? Maybe it is time to toss ‘em.

My fridge has really no food. Anything saved in there has to be eaten right away. I do have a bottle of champagne that is a good four years old as well as assorted bottles of chick booze that have ended up at my house and into my refrigerator. I also have one solitary bottle of Rolling Rock.

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