Saving Money Milestone

We are saving money. This is usually a prime point of discussion between my wife and I .

Over Christmas vacation, we (really, I) played Guitar Hero. A lot. I love that game. I have been wanting to get it for our own Wii.

Guitar Hero costs at least $90. Thus the conflict.

Last night, I realized that playing guitar (a real one, the one I already own), is also pretty fun.

I told Kate, "I don't think we need to get Guitar Hero right now."

Last night I learned the chords to "Total Eclipse of the Heart". That song seriously has like 11 chords in it, so it is fun.

Not as fun as "Cool Thing" on Medium, but still.

Marathons and stuff

I was reading my wife's blog and was reminded we saw a movie last night. It was pretty good. The movie is a documentary of sorts about six different people and their preparation and completion of the Chicago Marathon in 2005. Some notably funny parts:

The almost-my-speed guy who is trying to qualify for Boston is talking with some friends and he complains that "The qualifying times for Boston are totally skewed towards women and older people." As he says this, you can see his wife (who already qualified) give him a look. Even I wanted to smack the guy.

That same guy describes lists reasons why Chicago is such a popular marathon: "... it's in October so it's usually pretty cool." This year at least one person died, many were hospitalized, and they had to shut down the course due to water-shortages caused by the oppressive heat.

Altogether though, it was good. There were old people, babies, an elite man and woman in the coverage, so it was pretty balanced.

The reason I posted this though was because I came up with a good way to describe what it's like to run a marathon. Every training run you do is like putting money in the bank. In fact, I've had a few coaches call workouts "putting money in the bank". And when you have a marathon, it's a big withdrawal.

So, so me, training for a marathon is like saving up for a big purchase (like a car). And not just because you put money in the bank, but you hope what you bought is something good. My first marathon went horribly. Kind of like saving up for a BMW, only to find out that it was actually a rusted out Datsun. So on my second marathon, where things actually went as planned, it was so awesome to save up for my BMW, go to the BMW dealer, and actually drive home in a BMW.

Side note: It is physically hard for me to type BMW. Every single time I type BMX first, and then fix it. I miss my BMX bike. :(

This is pretty cool

How to be a frugal traveler

I feel like I've got some experience in this now that Kate and I have planned a May vacation/escape thingy that entails us going to Minneapolis, Fargo, San Francisco, and Boston over the course of a week. Here's my top 5 methods for doing it on the cheap.

1. Stay with family, hotels are expensive. Yeah, it's kind of obvious. And it limits your travel options. But if you are lucky like us, you have family all over the place. As of this summer we will have family in Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. That's four of the coolest cities in the US. Add in my friends in NYC, and you've got your bases covered. This also saves money on food, because you don't have to go out for every meal, and you can even cook up a good meal to make up for the fact that you are messing with your hosts' schedules.


2. Use kayak.com, but don't use it. Kayak the best travel website I've ever used. It is the dogpile of travel websites. It searches all the other travel websites (expedia, orbitz, travelocity, all the airlines websites, etc.) and gives you the best prices. Then, when you find the cheapest flight, go to the airline to buy that exact same flight. This keeps you from paying the service fee of travelocity/orbitz/etc. It's not a lot you save by going directly to the flight, but it's something. We saved around $100 on this go-round by doing that.


3. If it's multi-destination, fly on multiple carriers. This is because all airlines work the same way: unless you get a rare direct flight, they fly you to a hub airport, and then out of the hub to your destination. Which is all well and good, unless you are traveling to multiple cities. For instance, our first flight to Minneapolis is easy to get a flight on Frontier, because it is a hub for Frontier's hub is in Minneapolis. Our second flight goes to SF, and that is a hub for another airline. Our third goes to Boston, and that is a hub for another. Flying on one airline for all three flights would be much more expensive than if we switched. We didn't know this always. We can't help but regret our method for flying to Minneapolis, and then from Fargo to Hartford this winter. Since only two airlines fly out of Fargo, our flights to Minneapolis were far more limited that they would have been had we flown on another carrier. And far more expensive. Never again!


4. Start at the biggest airport you can get to. For this trip, we are flying our of Boston. Our nearest airport, Bradley, is only 45 minutes away, but we are flying out of Boston because the flights are about $100 cheaper, each way. That's more than enough to cover the cost of gas and parking, so we are going to Boston. You have to work out your own cost/benefit analysis, but for us it really works out.

So there you go. Aaron's four tips for keeping in the black during travel. Wooo!

Pitbulls are now cute

It is official.


Via CuteOverload.

Eating animals and their delicious bodily secretions

Just thought I'd drop a little rant. Apparently the FDA has said that cloned animals are safe to eat. As somebody who has the most basic understanding of biology, I say, "No s***, sherlock". I can understand (maybe) being worried about irradiated stuff, hormones, steroids, and all that other "flavor-enhancers" that probably wind up in my Oscar Meyer. The whole point of cloning is that the animals are the same. Same when they are alive, same when they are dead, same when cooked at 350 and basted every 15 minutes with olive oil and sage. They are basically forced-twins. And I don't know if you've ever eaten twin cows before, but let me tell you, they are delicious.

Funnily enough, some people are saying that the advent (and possible popularity) of cloned meat will cause more people to switch to Vegetarianism, or even Veganism. I've got my thoughts on the subject, and the internet is always listening, so here goes:

In my mind, the purpose of altering your diet from the norm is to correct for dietary changes that have been made over time (specifically relating to animals). Changes are generally made in a sequential order (you've got to screw up one thing before you screw up something else), so to me it makes more sense to fix the latest change first. In this case, the changes have been made by humanity as a whole. So, let's go back to the latest mistake, probably 40 or so years ago: the use of growth hormones, steroids, and all that great stuff in animals that we eat. Easy enough to correct, just don't eat any meats that are made with that stuff. Fine (hopefully, the USDA is helping us label this stuff, I have no idea, and am just an ignorant eater of food.)

Second change, probably about 100 or so years ago: using excessive preservatives in foods like bologna, hotdogs, sandwich meat, etc. Fine. Easy fix, only eat fresh stuff. (Guilty, I love a hotdog).

Third change (and here is where we start going back a ways, probably 150 or so years): Animals that are factory raised. This is another easy fix, only buy free-range food. "Free-range" by definition is probably overkill for this change, but it let's me skip steps. This is the first step where you've got to start shopping at Whole Foods or something, so pay attention.

Fourth change: If you think about it, before the industrial revolution, the only real changes in the agricultural industry was the fact that it started. So, if you want to go that far (about 3,000 years or something like that), you've got to give up eating any meat that wasn't hunted. No more farm-raised anything. And definitely no dairy (ever tried milking a wild cow?) and a lot less eggs. So at this point you are at the doorstep of veganism, but far from vegetarianism.

Fifth change: We are already back into the pre-historical times of hunter-gatherers, since agriculture was the rock upon which civilization was built. So how much further do we go back? Well, according to most evolutionary biologists (most biologists), our digestive system is much more like that of a herbivore than a carnivore. The digestive track of a carnivore (like a tiger) is pretty much a straight shot, stomach to butthole. Herbivores' take a winding path. Hell, a cow has four stomachs. According to my hazy memory, our small intestines are around 54 feet long. That sounds pretty planty to me. At this point, we've probably traveled back before the time that we were exclusively bipedal (if you believe that hogwash).

So, back to the veganism/vegan/whole-foods shopper thing. This is my viewpoint:

If you say "I only eat free-range meats," that's basically saying "I think society took a dietary wrong turn about 150 years ago (at the latest), and blah blah blah."

If you say "I am vegan," you're saying "I think society took a dietary wrong turn around 3000 years ago, and the rest is mostly academic."

If you say "I am vegetarian," you're saying "I think humanity took a wrong turn when we started killing animals."

But other animals hunt for food. And they aren't wrong to do so (presumably, animals seem to get a free ride when it comes to questions of their motives). So, the question is, have humans evolved to the point where we don't need animals to survive any longer? Did we ever? How does cannibalism fit in? This issue just got a whole lot more interesting that cloned pigs.

Hello World

... and thus tradition is carried on for the creation of yet another blog. The internet shudders with the mundane.

Yeah, I'm basically just going to post stuff that I see elsewhere and is fun, and maybe some photos that I take. Sometime. Maybe.