Tonight I purchased running shoes.  I purchased $100.00 running shoes.  I am going to have feet that don’t hurt when I exercise and knees and a back that don’t kill me after having attempted to get healthy.  I will spend more on shoes, but less at the doctor.  I want to go hiking and hike a 14,000 foot mountain this summer, but my knees are going to need to be able to handle that and I don’t think they will unless I have shoes that support and work with consistent exercise to get my knees back into shape.

Don’t spend crazy amounts of money on shoes unless you’re going to use them, but watch out that your not doing damage to your body by wearing shoes that don’t cut the mustard.  I’ve got to go run to the closet and see if I’ve got something to wear to the ball.

I have, over time, received a very large Google check of $100.00 from Google every couple of what I have come to call “Google years”.  I run no less than 5 sites that have Google ads, but none of them actually generate what I would call revenue.  They’re blogs.  They have content that doesn’t get read often (other than a few pages that are linked to from within Wikipedia, surprisingly).  A Google Year is the amount of time it takes me to get the minimum amount of adsense clicky-clicky revenue.  The speed of light is measured in light years, the speed of money is measured in Google years.  The best way to compare the two is like this: Light years are like the fastest expensive sports car money can by and Google years (for me at least) are like a two wheeled Yugo being drawn by a three legged mule that is blind, missing a quarter of his right ear, and named Edna.  Edna is a boy horse who has been named incorrectly by a very abusive Yugo and mule owner.  Edna cannot compete with the expensive sports car in performance, but Edna moves, steadily forward.

If you want to maximize Google revenue you’ll want to put the advertisements all over your page, but I’m not interested in maximizing revenue, I’m interested in maximizing content.  You will find that I make decisions based on the capitalistic concept of ‘lazy faire’ which means, “let the people click on ads if they want to,” in English.  Lazy fair is Franglish, its English and French in origin and I think I just made it up.  Just like the money in the banks that Google dispenses every Google Year.

Another technique to becoming wealthy through Google is to be good at mathematics.  I understand that they only hire the best engineers, and then give them stock options.  I try to stay away from stock options because the stocks are right next to the gallows and I’d prefer not to get lynched.  Either way, being good at math will not hurt, especially if you have to use it in calculating the change from selling hamburgers at your third job because the Internet Millionaire thing isn’t working out.

• Sprinklers were turned off part way through the month
• The new dishwasher was installed after the month of October
• I didn’t bathe for most of October

OK, so the last two reasons don’t count, but the dishwasher will help a lot, and I fixed a very slow, but persistent dripping valve that lead to our sprinkler system, too, earlier this month.  Hooray for savings where we can get them!

This isn’t revolutionary by any stretch, but we’ve been living without a microwave for 3.5 years now and so having one kinda feel cool and funny.  Various things get hot quickly in the microwave instead of dirtying up several pots and pans, which means I may not have to run the dishwasher as often, or wash as many dishes as often.  Its funny to think how much we’ve been spending on some things because of the fact we didn’t have a microwave.

I actually ended up having to do the following, in case too much information is something you like to have:

• Remove old ventilation unit over the stove
• Remove old cabinet above old ventilation unit over the stove
• Do some electrical magic to make sure the microwave plugged in just right and didn’t cause electrical fires
• Fabricate a spacer/mount for the microwave so as to make sure that it stayed securely in place.  This was not in the directions, but I am overly concerned about things staying on my wall.
• Mount the microwave with help of the wife
• Partially unmount the microwave with help of the wife and fix the direction of the ventilation fan as per the step skipped in the directions I apparently didn’t read carefully enough
• Re-mount the microwave
• Re-mount the cabinet above the microwave and spacer/mount.  This changes our cabinet configuration, but in a good way.

For those of you keeping track I got to do electrical work, wood work, cabinetry (a slight exageration), and install a money saving device.  The only major casualty was my thumb when a random hammer flew out of nowhere and struck it.  I feel like the lovechild of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor and Suze Orman**.

** not really, that’s disgusting.  I’m really glad I have the parents I have.

So after paying the fine man for driving me a distance and then being fare about it, I met up with a colleague, walked to a somewhat nearby eating establishment and then nearly bled from my eyes when the bill for a hot dog and a soda came to just under $12.00.  For that price I could almost get to the airport!  Fortunately the food gave me sustenance enough to maintain me for long enough to make it to dinner where someone else was paying.  But seriously?!  $12.00?  It wasn’t even a big cup!

And thus, as I leave off here I want to make this one reccomendation: never leave your homes, and by all means never travel.  Traveling is expensive and there isn’t much good that comes from it except that you can see new places and have new experiences in life.  But that’s over-rated.  You can have new experiences by eating dirt and trying new food.  Oh, and if someone else takes you out to Del Frisco’s I LOVED their crab cake and I LOVED their potatoes aug gratin.  I hesitate to call any food perfect, but I don’t hesitate to call these perfect, they were that good.

Once upon a time there was a boy, we’ll call him me.  His name won’t be me, but I’m going to share a little about myself.  And actually, I wasn’t a little boy.  I was a grown man.  Well, I guess I still am.  But this story is about the idiocy of temporary pleasure verses the wisdom of thinking a little longer term, or very long term.  I had wanted to save money by spening less on the luxury of non-broadcast television and switched from Cable Television (with Comcastic service) to Satelite service DirectV from the stars… or some such nonsense.  I would save money and get the better programming of directive DirecTV.

Except that I had to agree to a two year contract to pay DetecTV monthly during that two years or else pay a penalty fee to infecTV for each month remaining in the contact.  Being a cheerful dolt, and not ever thinking that I would ever not want to get derelicTV, I agreed to that lovely penalty.  The world was grand and there were weeks of Food Network to watch with the added benefit of children’s cartoons, educational television, and news broadcasts twenty-four hours a day slevin days a week.  The fun and entertainment we would have due to DefecTV was endless.  Until we actually wanted to end the service.

Fast-forward a year and a half and I still have half a year left of paying more a month than I need to because we’re in a bundled package from our phone/internet/smellovision provider.  Locked in for two years of promised payment even though better deals could be had (and I would actually dump my land-line phone as well, thus futher reducing my monthly outgo towards communications and entertainment).  So the young boy who was me, who I am now -  as an adult, made a dumb choice because what he wanted then was what he was obviously going to want for two years.

The moral of this story, other than avoid the shoddy equipment that comes with the ‘awesome’ package at insecTV, is that you shouldn’t commit to a contract unless you’re really, really, really, really sure that its what you need, its what you want, and that you’re going to want it in two years with just as much passion or excitement.  There are a lot of companies that masquerade as your friend until they lock you into a contract and then you discover that you’re really bound, like so many periodicals, to servitude, slavery, and to eat pudding with cement mixed into it.  And after watching enough episodes of House on satellite television, I’m confidently going to announce that I’d no longer like to eat cement, I’ve seen what it can do to your intestines, and I don’t want to undergo that kind of surgery to get it out of me.

What do you want now?  What do you think you will still want in two years that you want now?

I think prostitution is abhorable for various reasons, but this article about prostitution being paid for with gasoline cars puts the gas price debate into a weird perspective: Sex for Fuel.  We’ve not found ourselves using more or less gas at this stage in the game simply because we don’t do as much driving as the average household.  I work from my basement most of the time and our gas prices are usually just slightly under the national average.

Now that Bill Gates has stepped down as chief officer of whatever at Microsoft maybe he can put forth some of his humanitarian efforts in some petroleum related way.  I don’t know how that would help alleviate pain and suffering in third world countries, but it would at least reduce first world pain at the pump.

I climbed up on my roof to secure the tape to the water valve floater’s stem so that the water would stop entering the floater and making it a sinker (thus flooding my swamp cooler and causing water to flow out of the overflow hole). I wrapped the threaded stem, secured the floater and climbed off the room and let the water fill up the swamp cooler again and waited for the overflow. No overflow took place and the problem was solved.

I then walked into the garage with the plumber’s tape and reached to put it on the hook where I would expect to put such a thing. That is where I found the last purchased plumbers tape that I had all along. Ha!

I had company in town and I didn’t purchase them the high end [high quality but not high priced] stuff I usually buy because they don’t like it (I offer and they generally refuse it).  But I did buy them what was supposed to be 10% Kona beans because I’m nice like that.  Except that the lemurs that put the coffee in the bins put the kona (read: hawaiian beans are in here) next to the hazelnut flavored coffee.  Note the word flavored.  That word should be a big warning sign.  They should label it, “Death star coffee flavored like hazelnuts so that the death will be sweet.”  But they don’t.

If you buy coffee that is supposed to be just plain coffee flavored out of the chute next to the flavored death star stuff then spill a little of the beans into the bag and then smell the beans.  Your nose should be able to tell if miracles have happened and your kona coffee smells like coffee or if the evil siths of hazelnut have taken over and your imported beans are really just polluted with bad ju-ju.

Save your money on the coffee that’s been polluted, report to a store manager that the devil responsible for putting the coffee in that chute should be chastised heavily, and then buy something else that may not be what you wanted, but will not be polluted.  Unless of course you’re into flavored coffee, in which case by all means just dump the arabica beans into the bag and proceed with your business.  I’m embarrassed to have written this post because I prefer home roasted coffee if possible.  But I’m a coffee snob and I have to deal with that burden every day.