Day: April 15, 2024

Answer Me This — Stupid Purchase

Fandango5 Comments

Suze, over at Obsolete Childhood has introduced a new prompt called “Answer Me This.” Suze says it’s “an alternative daily prompt” to the WordPress Daily Prompt, which she characterized as “ones that totally suck and are focused upon the young people here.

Anyway, her prompt question today is this:

Have you ever wasted a large amount of money purchasing something that later you thought was stupid? What was it?

My most beloved car ever was a 1967 silver-blue Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III. I absolutely loved that car, but it was essentially a two-seater British Roadster. I had recently been promoted to a position at work that occasionally required me to shuttle people from place to place, so my boss told me I needed to buy a car that could comfortably accommodate four people.

If I had been more business savvy at the time, I would have told him to lease me a company car and would have kept my Healey. But I was naive, needed the job, and, with a broken heart, sold my ‘67 Austin-Hraley 3000 Mk III for $2,200.

(Just as an aside, I Googled “1967 Austin-Hraley 3000 Mk III” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 80 grand. What?)

Anyway, a few years went by and I felt I was in a position to maintain my practical car and to try to recapture the feeling of having a classic British Roadster, so I bought a used 1959 Jaguar XK150 for $2,300.

This wasn’t my car, but it looked just like it.

It was drivable, but just barely. In the 3 years I owned it, it spent about 2 3/4 years in the shop of a self-proclaimed Jaguar mechanic who called himself “Jaguar Joe.” I probably paid Jaguar Joe more than I paid for the car in the first place, and he was never able to get it to run for more than a week or two at a time. I finally ended up just letting him keep the damn thing.

(Just as an aside, I Googled “1959 Jaguar XK 150 S Roadster” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 100+ grand. What?)

So, bottom line, between the cost to buy the Jaguar and what I paid Jaguar Joe in his unsuccessful attempts to make the vehicle road-worthy — all in my ill-fated effort to try to recapture a past feeling — buying that Jaguar was a very stupid purchase.

Share Your World — 04/15/2024

Fandango4 Comments
Share Your World

Di, at Pensitivity101, is our host for Share Your World each week. Here are her questions for this week.

1. Regardless of whether you had them or not, can you remember three popular toys from when you were a child?

Hmm. This is tough thinking back six or seven decades to popular toys. I do remember liking to build things with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs. I also enjoyed playing with Silly Putty (which, if I recall correctly, came in plastic eggs) and Play-Doh. And who can forget Mr. Potato Head, Slinky, and the Hula Hoop! Toy cars, also. I loved playing with toy cars and trucks. And model airplane kits.

2. Did you ever want something specific as a child, but never had it?

This isn’t a toy, but I remember when Walt Disney opened Disneyland — I think it was in 1954 or 55 — and used to hawk it on his Walt Disney Presents TV show that I used to watch on Sunday nights. I wanted so bad to go to Disneyland, but we lived in Maryland at the time, and Disneyland was near Los Angeles. I begged my parents to take me to Disneyland but there was no way that they could afford it.

It wasn’t until more than a quarter of a century later, after my wife and I moved to Southern California, that we took our kids, who were 5 and 3, to Disneyland, that my dream to go to Disneyland finally came true.

3. Do you still have any toys or games from your childhood?

No, but my grandchildren have a number of them,

4. I think I’ve asked this before, but what was your favorite toy as a child?

Probably my Etch-a-Sketch. I used to spend hours with that thing. I wish we had digital photography back then so I could have taken pictures of some of the more elaborate sketches I painstakingly created.

Bits and Pieces — April 15, 2023

Fandango16 Comments

Just a few bits and pieces that I thought I might share with you today.

Number 1 in the Nation

Mississippi Christians have erected a 14th giant cross. The latest cross — 120 feet high and 64 feet wide — towers over the town of Aberdeen, and cost $240,000 in private donations. Mike Rozier, whose company is putting up the massive crosses, says it’s money well spent, despite Mississippi’s very high poverty rate. “People say Mississippi ranks 49th or 50th of 50 states in various categoies,” Rozier says, but “we’re proud to say we’re number 1 in the number of crosses.”

The Check is in the Mail

Only 70 percent of mail intended to be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service within three to five days arrived on time last year, an 11 percent drop from 2022. A $40 billion overhaul of the system ordered by the Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has caused widespread disruptions, and state and federal officials are voicing concerns about the possible impact on mail-in ballots in the 2024 presidential election.

A Lot of Work to Do

Atmospheric concentrations of the three most potent greenhouse gases rose to new record levels in 2023, highlighting the failure by world leaders and industry to curb carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emis-sions.

While the increases in each did not quite match the record jumps of recent years, the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and livestock farming have brought the world’s CO2 levels 50% higher than they were before the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

“As these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere,” said Vanda Grubisi, director of NOAA’s global monitoring laboratory.

A2Z Challenge — The Letter M

Fandango28 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

M is for Marilyn W.

Marilyn was in the in-crowd in our high school senior class. The group of girls she was in were the untouchables to all but the varsity athletes and the guys with movie-star good looks. She was way out of my league.

Marilyn was in a few of my classes and, more so than any of the other girls in her clique, she was always pleasant to me. So one day I decided to go for the fences and ask her out on a date. And much to my surprise and delight, she said yes!

I made arrangements to meet her at a bar and grill in Georgetown. In Washington, DC the drinking age for beer and wine was 18 and I had just turned 18 the month before. I didn’t have my own car at the time, so I got my good friend Bill, who was a couple of years older than me, to give me a lift to the place and when I met Marilyn there, he could go off and do his own thing.

When Marilyn arrived with a few of her friends, I secured a table for the two of us and ordered a pitcher of beer and some nachos to get us started. She and I were talking and laughing and having a very nice time. But while I was nursing my second glass of beer, Marilyn had polished off the rest of the pitcher. So I ordered another pitcher.

I was not that much of a beer drinker back then. Usually one or two were my limit. But Marilyn was putting them down, and soon I had to order yet another pitcher. I vowed that I would do my best to keep up with her on this third pitcher and started picking up my pace to match hers.

She seemed to be fine having consumed all of this beer and I was getting a little drunk. But we kept talking and laughing and at one point she resched across the table and grabbed my hands. I was thrilled. But I was also feeling kind of bloated and I was getting a churning feeling in my stomach. And that was when a catastrophe occurred.

Suddenly and without warning, my mouth opened and a huge amount of vomit spewed out all over the table and all over Marilyn. The volume of vomit was enough to drip over the table and onto the floor just as a waiter walked by carrying a tray full of beers. He slipped on my vomit and his tray went flying into the air. The beer contents from a bunch of mugs full of draught beer fell on Marilyn’s head, drenching her.

It all happened in an instant, but from my perspective is was more like happening in super slow motion. Then I felt myself being lifted up by the armpits by two big guys and being literally tossed out of the restaurant.

There was a huge commotion behind me in the restaurant and I heard police sirens in the distance. Suddenly my friend Bill scooped me up off the sidewalk and practically dragged me to his car, threw me in the backseat, and we sped away.

On Monday, back at school I saw Marilyn and smiled sheepishly but she wouldnt even look at me. At one point, after a class we were in together, I started to walk toward her to apologize, but she put up her hand to stop me and abruptly turned and walk the other way. In fact, she didnt speak to me for the remainder of our senior year.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L

FOWC with Fandango — Antidote

Fandango22 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “antidote.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.