Buying

A bad habit I’m working on stopping is talking myself into a purchase that isn’t necessary. For example, I’ll have a bag of frozen french fries in the freezer but I’ll want to buy fries from Five Guys. Because it takes 10 to 15 minutes for me to get home from there, the 5 Guy fries need to be heated up in the oven. This is an easy solution, just make the fries I have at home instead.

This past Christmas I got money from my parents and put half into savings, the other half into my pocket. I was going to buy the Lego Lakeside Lodge but recently my external hard drive stopped working. After I bought a new hard drive from the Apple Store in the Westchester, I was going to buy the LEGO set but as I walked back to my car (which meant going past the LEGO store again) I talked myself out of it since I used all of the money from the gift plus my own. I didn’t need another LEGO since I got the Star Wars Eclipse Fighter for Christmas as well.

All I Needed Was My Bike And Walkman

One thing I miss from my youth is riding my ten speed around Galloway Lane & Foxhill Road, especially at night since the neighborhood would “shut down” after 6pm.

Best was when I bought a new cassette of a favorite band or singer and could listen to both sides without being interrupted until it was time to flip the tape to Side 2. I remember how awesome it was owning a Walkman that had Auto Reverse. For the younger generation, that meant I could listen to one side and the Walkman would switch over to the other side.

One night I was listening to The Sugarcubes ‘Life’s Too Good’ for the first time when 'Take Some Petrol Darling' started and scared me enough where I almost fell off my bike.

Recently I purchased Transvision Vamp ‘Pop Art’ and while listening to ‘Wild Star’ it brought back the memory of riding on the down slope of Fox Hill Lane and swerving from one side of the street to the other.

The downside to a Walkman was the wire for the headphones also acted as the antenna so I’d get interference from the power lines that were around the block. When I rode on top of the Kensico Dam on my way to the Central Avenue Toys R Us, that problem went away.

Reading

I used to enjoy reading, to the point where I laid in bed all day reading Wizard & Glass in the Gunslinger series from Stephen King. Now I’ll read for 5 minutes and that’s enough for a month.

So I decided to remedy this situation by rereading a favorite series, The Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster. Thanks to the Amazon gift card from my brother, I bought the first book. It was tempting to buy the complete series since it was $49.95 but that would have used up the gift card.

It’s been a slow start and Alan can’t be blamed, I still enjoy Jon-Tom’s introduction to Mudge. I could have spent time reading last Monday since I had a day off from work, but was still recovering from New Year’s Eve (I ate too much baked brie and cookies & cream)

This past Monday, I sat down, cracked open my iPad and read the rest of chapter 1. I still laugh from the humor of Mudge and Jon-Tom’s outlook of the strange world he’s now a part of.