Life at DrTom's: Mostly Humorous Anecdotes by a Mostly Retired Cornell Professor. Thomas A. Gavin
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the clerk. What day is this? "It is Pizza Supreme Special day, sir". What!!! We never learned that in primary school. That is NOT one of the seven names I memorized. I regained my composure, I gently grabbed her wrist and held it on the counter, and I looked into her eyes intently. “Please.. tell.. me.. what.. day.. of.. the.. week.. this.. is. You know, like Monday or Tuesday or whatever.” And she said, "just a minute, I'll have to ask the manager". Honest to God. The 20-year old kid from Ithaca College was as clueless as I was.
I returned home. I walked into the house and Robin said, "Hey, you wanna go to the movies tonight? It's Friday. We can see that Keanu Reeves' film." I sat down, on the verge of a headache and stared at her incredulously. How did you know what day of the week it was, I asked? "The cell phone". So we went to the cinema downtown, and saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still". What a dumb title. It didn't even tell us which day of the week that calamity happened.
(Note: if you want to really blow your mind, try figuring out when to take the trash and recyclables to the curb here in Danby. Trash pickup is now on Fridays, but they pick up recyclables only on alternate Mondays!).
Picking up returnable bottles and cans for fun and profit
My wife was a dutiful, frugal girl when she was young. In primary school, she would routinely bring her dime or quarter every Tuesday on banking day, and she would have that money deposited in her bank account. (You young people will not know about this, but back in the day, we actually had such a day at school. Apparently, these school banking programs are making a come-back.) At the end of several years of this kind of weekly deposits, she had saved several hundred dollars, which was quite an impressive sum in the 1950s. When she went off to nursing school in 1965, her parents gave her $5 as spending money. Months later, she still had that same 5-spot. During three entire years at this school (she went year-round), during which her room and board were prepaid, she didn't spend more than about $25, although she used a Lazarus Department Store credit card to buy one dress for a Homecoming dance and a slip in preparation for our wedding shortly before she graduated. That was it!
Those of you born to a later generation can not possibly believe what I am saying, but the appraisal above of what my future wife spent in college is the absolute truth. We dated during most of that time. We almost never went out, we never drank alcohol, and we bought next to nothing. We simply did not have the money to spend and, of course, a dollar went a lot farther than it does today.
It should, therefore, come as little surprise that my wife collects empty soda and beer cans that she finds along the side of the road in rural New York. Coke cans, DrPepper cans, Bud Light cans, plastic ginger ale containers. Each one is worth a nickel. The similarity in her mind between saving pennies each week at Dover Elementary School and picking up discarded nickels today is no accident. As a child, she saw what that kind of regular saving could accomplish, and she never forgot that important financial lesson.
The problem is that the cost-benefit ratio is very different today than it was five decades ago. To collect these nickels, we often stop the car in hazardous locations. We have almost had our driver-side door taken off by a passing car, we have come close to putting the car in the drainage ditch in our attempt to move the car to a safe location off the road, and we have both twisted or sprained our ankles as we negotiated these same ditches. Once I jumped into one of these pits to fetch a nickel or two and I ripped a hole in my $30 pants (= 600 cans). Not a good deal. Then, after you put the containers in the car, they invariably leak their remaining contents onto the seats or carpet and, for days, the car smells like you held a frat party in there.
If the cans were crushed before being discarded by the side of road (data: about 5% of cans), they need to be straightened out enough so that the bar code can be read by the machine into which you feed them at the grocery store. If they can not be straightened to the satisfaction of that contraption, you do not get your nickel. I have fed some cans into that machine 8 or 10 times in an attempt to get it to read that code, only to have it belch out the can as if it was spitting on my torn pants. The same thing happens if the can has been laying out in the weather for a couple of years; the bar code is so faint and unreadable that the machine gets the last laugh.
But this slow but sure strategy of accumulating wealth can pay off. A few years ago, my wife was able to fly our two sons home from Denver without my knowing with pop can money to celebrate my 60th birthday. And this is all with the return deposit at only a nickel. There is discussion of raising the deposit to a dime in New York State. If that happens, we might buy a second home in Costa Rica. If the deposit ever went to a quarter, I would buy a fleet of used vehicles and hire a team of picker-uppers to scour Tompkins County for its booty. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound.
But already we have someone else picking up cans on the road in front of OUR house. This is our territory, our grub stake, our returnable can domain. My wife has been hiding in our woods next to the road two days a week in hopes of ambushing the person. She baits the shoulder of the road with 2-3 clean, Bud Light cans (I helped by emptying the cans) placed in a neat little bunch. Irresistible. We must stop this can poaching.
This blogger admits being on performance-enhancing drugs
I have some gastroenterology issues of late. I suffer somewhat with a hiatal hernia and an affliction known as eosinophilic esophagitis. Part of the treatment for this condition is a drug that comes in an atomizer (Flovent) that I squirt in my mouth daily and then swallow. The active ingredient is a corticosteroid. Within days after starting this regimen I began to feel wonderfully different.
My wife noticed that I am looking more and more buff as the days pass. I am stronger, and I have been contacted by Nike to represent them in the blogging world. Their new line of writing clothes will have a logo of a pen and paper, instead of the Swoosh, denoting the tools of the original authors of old. The steroid I am taking has improved my ability to think of useful words, synonyms, and metaphors, and the substance gives me an edge in a very competitive arena. I type faster and more accurately than ever, including the ability to hit that back slash with the little finger on my right hand. Before starting this cycle of steroid, my right-hand finger could not reach past the key that has the left-facing bracket.
Am I worried about an investigation or any unannounced drug-testing of a urine sample? Not really. Since I began taking this drug, I only urinate outside in the woods so that the sample soaks immediately into the soil. They will never get my urine for testing. Also, I have no need to frequent a locker room for writers, so there is little danger of bragging to my colleagues who would probably squeal to the paparazzi like a stuffed pig. I have no mistress who might have incriminating text messages from me, and I'm an atheist, so I don't even confess to a priest who might talk. I have all the bases covered.
Not sure how long this euphoria will last. And I am worried about the long-term effects of using Flovent. One side effect is that you begin too lossE yyyour motorr skillz, buh i dubt this wila ahpoen to ee.
I’ll bet you don’t own a pair of orange chaps
Have you ever had a close call while riding on a bicycle or motorcycle? You know the kind I mean. You start to turn left and the car behind you slams on its brakes and blasts its horn, nearly skidding into your left leg. Or, you are swimming alone offshore, the currents seem much stronger than normal, and before you know it, you are 300 meters from the beach where you started, and you make it back to shore only after an intense struggle. Later, you learn that if you had just had a simple rear view mirror on your bike or you knew more about ocean tides, you would have been much less likely to be in peril. A little preparation ahead of time would have saved you a possible knee surgery, or prevented you from ending up like a drowned rat on the beach in Bermuda after entering the water near Miami the week before.
About a week ago I took a 5-hour Chain Saw Safety and Productivity course taught in Candor, NY by Jim Signs. What an epiphany! How I managed not to cut off my right ear or my left foot all these years is beyond me.
I thought I was being safe:
1. I only drank beer out of a can while using the chain saw. I never drank from a bottle, which could break and cut you.