Excellent things about today

[pegkerr]

The bike runs much better when the tires are inflated to the proper pressure.

Perfect weather. Absolutely perfect. Lovely walk on Stone Arch Bridge.

Decadent chocolate cake at the office to celebrate my fifteenth anniversary with the firm.

Bonus check for the same.

Some CDs purchased with said bonus.

The rest will be banked, easing my financial worries a little.

Forgetting that my karate class was supposed to start at 6:20 instead of 5:40 (sometimes I confuse my lesson times with Fiona's). So I took the class with the kids. And I had so much fun that I stayed and took my regular class. An hour and a half of karate. Excellent.

Fish tacos at Pepitos. Very cheap and tasty and extremely healthy.

Espresso chocolate cookie at Tillie's Bean.

Comments

Excellent

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

Happy work anniversary and all my best regarding efforts at the dojo.

Once our RenFest starts and I have extra dough I'm going to look for a place where I can swim or use an exercise machine (low-impact would best). Right now it is so stinking hot that I don't feel like doing anything, but I'm at a point in weight loss (stalemate) that I really really need to step up exercise to show any improvement (I'm eating even less right now because when it's hot, I develope a protein aversion, especially pieces/chunks of meat). And my family (3 adults including me) likes at very minimum a piece of meat and a starchy side for dinner.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Such lovelies!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yup, keep those tires pumped up.
madtechie2718 has an electric bike with a computer that measures how many watts are being burned, and he says a small drop in tire pressure results in the computer showing a significant increase in power draw.

Due to his comments, when I needed new tires I went from 38s to 32s, and I keep them pumped up to 80-100 PSI. I neglected them for a few weeks and on Tuesday I checked and found they were down to 40 PSI. Wednesday the pedaling was a lot easier.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Oh, all sorts of good things! Very cool.

[ckd]

Hooray for what sounds like a very excellent day!

Here's hoping it's only the first of a long string of similarly excellent days for you.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Wait, wait, a bonus check for 15 years?
At our place we get to choose a crappy gift from a catalog. The selection of 10 year gifts was worth a max of about $50. It looks like the 15 year ones are worth maybe $75. And most of it was golf crud or something else useless, and anything interesting was cheap crap (cruddy binoculars, FILM cameras (does anyone use those anymore?) etc).
I was underwhelmed. As I was telling someone at the time, I would have been less insulted if they hadn't done anything at all. I would have rather gotten a $20 bill.

Gifts

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There's a general concept here that has fascinated me for years: the notion of gifts as a "lossy" mechanism of value transfer. If I give you a gift that I purchased for $100, it is very likely that you would not get $100 of value from it. (I would have had to perfectly guess what you liked, if you liked it that much you would have bought it for yourself, etc.) So that means that the Christmas gift-giving season, although it generates upteen billion dollar in sales, causes an enormous loss in national wealth.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I really don't like gift-giving traditions.

B

Re: Gifts

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

My favorite gift has always been cash. It's been a long time since I've gotten a gift that was anything I wanted or needed apart from the green stuff.
My LEAST favorite gift is a gift certificate/card. It's like cash but not as good since it locks you into one store. You might think you know at least a store I'd be able to spend money in, but a few years back I had a $200 gift card to CompUSA, and I wandered there for 2 hours and couldn't find a single thing I wanted/needed.

I did get a Lowes card a few weeks ago and used that up, but it's all household stuff, not stuff for me. That's fine with me but most givers like to think they're giving to an individual.

Re: Gifts

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Gift cards are like that.

Stores love them because the breakage is so high. And in order to use up a gift certificate of a certain value, you have to spend more than that value.

B

Re: Gifts

[laurel]

Yup.

I've found it interesting that there are more and more sites where people trade or sell gift cards. Makes sense really.

I totally approve of something like a Mall of America gift card. More and more malls have them-- that significantly increases the likelihood that someone will be able to find something.

"Fish tacos at Pepitos."

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Those are good.

B

Re: "Fish tacos at Pepitos."

[laurel]

Yup, they are. Mmmm, Pepitos.

Hey, I could walk or drive over there right now for lunch. Sweet.