Financial Advice: Go Wholesale

The other day, I decided to do some comparison shopping, comparing the new Wal Mart groceries-only store I often shop at due to its low prices and physical proximity and the local CostCo. I bought some items I needed at the CostCo after working out at the gym across the street and then swung by the Wal Mart to get some fruit and compare the prices.

On the way to the Wal Mart is the QuikTrip where I often get gas. It was $3.15 per gallon there, but at the CostCo, it was $2.80 per gallon. If I save around $0.30/gallon (the difference isn't always the same) and I generally get 12-13 gallons of gas at a time, this saves $3.60 to $3.90 per tank. Over the course of a year, assuming I get gas around once per week, this would save $187-200. Considering a CostCo membership is  $55 per year, this would pay for itself massively. Even if the difference is only $0.10 per gallon, that's $60-70ish per year--still a net profit.

Once actually at the Wal Mart, I compared the cost of a gallon of one percent milk (the kind I usually get) to the cost of the two percent milk I got at CostCo. The CostCo milk was around $1 cheaper per gallon. If I consume a gallon of milk every two weeks, that saves me $25 per year.

I also compared the price of ice cream, which at the Wal Mart was $3 for 1.75 quarts but approximately $10 for two half-gallons sold together at CostCo. I busted out my calculator and found that at Wal Mart rates, it would be $13 for a full gallon of ice cream. I purchase ice cream much less often so I cannot calculate how much I'd save per year, but considering how I sometimes accompany cereal with raisins and bananas with a homemade milkshake for additional protein and fat (so I don't get hungry too fast during the day), it's probably a bit of money.

I didn't join CostCo until I'd been up on the Northside for awhile, probably more than a year since I took the new job. Before, when I lived on the Southside, I would periodically take advantage of the free month or two deals at the BJ's in McDonough. However, that was mostly to get the Tyson chicken fingers that only wholesalers seem to carry and the huge cinnamon muffins, with gas being an afterthought. I'd thought that since I was a single person, I simply wouldn't consume enough to make it worth the yearly membership fee. I had friends who were the first to make the leap into wholesale membership, but considering how it was two roommates and later one's eventual wife sharing a membership, I figured they'd eat enough to make it worthwhile.

In retrospect, that was a mistake. I don't remember the gas at BJ's being that much cheaper than elsewhere, but as my earlier example reveals, a $0.10 difference can be a substantial difference per year. BJ's membership is $50/year, so $60-70 would be a net profit, even if it would be only enough to see a movie or two.

So this is my advice to you, dear reader. Even if you're single, if you live a convenient distance from a wholesale club that has a gas station attached, get a membership. It might require revamping your shopping habits a bit (in my case, that means getting stuff that goes bad fast on separate trips), but even a little savings will add up. I didn't, and it probably cost me a few hundred bucks.

Writing Exercises, Courtesy of TVTropes

I posted an earlier blog post on the Facebook wall of my friend Alex Hughes since I had referenced a comment she made during writing group in it.

This spawned a discussion about the use of TVTropes for marketing.  She is skeptical of the concept, while I think it would be a good way to do viral marketing.  Meanwhile, Terra LeMay warned that the Merriam-Webster definition of a "trope" also includes the word "cliche" and so if there are a lot of tropes in one's work, that might be a bad sign.

(Somewhere along the way, someone posted a "Periodic Table" of fiction using individual TVTropes as the elements.  That got discussed as well.)

Based on these discussions, I came up with a few writing exercises that could be useful for brainstorming or stretching one's writing muscles.  Both exercises use TVTropes.  Here goes...

Exercise #1: Take randomly-selected tropes and try to include them in a story.  Bonus points if they're from totally different genres, so getting a sensible storyline out of them takes hard work.

Exercise #2: Inspired by Terra's comment about how she only uses tropes when she wants to "upend or invert them."  Basically, your mission is to take one or more tropes and do the exact opposite.

Here's something I came up with as a joke to entertain Alex and Terra but figured could be an interesting "inverted trope" story element:

The only thing that really trips the "cliche alarm" in my opinion in Battle for the Wastelands is the destruction of Carroll Town, which begins Andrew Sutter's journey that will eventually take him across the Iron Desert and back again.  On TVTropes, this is called "Doomed Hometown."

So instead of the protagonist beginning his quest for revenge on the Big Bad after the Big Bad destroys his hometown, kills his family, etc., he begins his quest because the Big Bad has decided to make his hometown his new capital, a major military base, etc.  A lot people he knows lose their land (either through eminent domain or simply being chased off) due to the need for palaces, defensive works, etc., while others are forced to sell because property taxes have gotten too high for them to pay.

Perhaps the resulting conflict can be called the Gentrification War.  :)

That could be an interesting subversion of the "Doomed Hometown" trope because although gentrification will hurt some people, it will also benefit others (people supplying the palaces and military bases with goods or labor, frex)--destroying the town and killing or enslaving the people is bad for everyone.  If the hero eventually defeats the Big Bad, he'll find a lot of "his people" aren't going to be too pleased.

Thoughts on "Law and Order: SVU" (spoilers for 9/22 episodes)

I admit I'm drawing the following conclusions based on relatively little data, but here goes...

Is it just me, or do episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit throw everything but the kitchen sink into their plots?

In the episode "Witness," which ran in mid-March and I watched while working out late at the gym, a woman with a not-so-great reputation is raped by some lowlife who claims she'd led him on and the only witness is a woman who it turns out is an illegal immigrant from the Congo.  She had been raped repeatedly, in really bizarre ways that I'm not going to describe here but actually do happen in real life.  The Immigration and Naturalization Service tries to deport her in the middle of the trial, claiming she's married to one of the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide.  It turns out she had been forced into this marriage after being carried off to a camp where coltan, a mineral used in the developed world's cell phones, is mined by slaves controlled by militias.

(Let's see--blaming the victim in rape cases, illegal immigration, terrorism, the Congo, and conflict minerals.)

Tonight was another late night at the gym and an episode entitled "Locum" was on.  In this one, a 10-year-old girl named Mackenzie adopted from foster care runs away and the police initially detain a man they think is a pedophile who had lured Mackenzie away from home.  The man claims to have had a sister who was raped and committed suicide and was part of an anti-pervert advocacy group who had befriended Mackenzie online with the goal of keeping her from running away and falling into the hands of a real pervert.

(The man--Erik Weber--is much more than he seems, but that doesn't pop up until the next episode, "Bullseye.")

Mackenzie's ludicrously overprotective adoptive parents are apparently trying to use her to replace their biological daughter Ella.  Ella disappeared while on a hiking trip with them several years before at the age of 10 after going off to play with a mysterious red-haired teenager.  An elaborate trail of investigation leads to a young prostitute who had been involved in underage pornography who it turns out was the red-haired girl. 

What happened was, she had been ordered by her drunken father to lure Ella away from her mother.  Her dad, whose wife had left him weeks prior, intended to use Ella as a replacement wife.  The redhead ran away from home after watching her father apparently beat Ella to death, becoming an underage porn star in order to survive.

The SVU gang arrives at the pervy dad's house out in the woods and it turns out Ella is there, still alive and convinced the redhead's skanky redneck dad is her husband.

(Let's see--"helicopter parents," creeps befriending girls on the Internet, dysfunctional adoptions, kids bouncing from foster home to foster home, underage pornography, prostitution, and screwballs kidnapping young girls and brainwashing them into captive pseudo-wives, like that case in California involving the girl missing for over a decade.  Yikes.)

I do admit these complicated plots do make for interesting viewing, which I guess is the point.  I spent a lot more time doing cardio to watch "Locum" and less time doing weights, since I could not see the television from the weight machines.

Perhaps I'll swim 20 laps tomorrow, to make up for the neglected upper-body workout.

Gym Cyclists Help Power Hotel

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20002995-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Now this seems like something that benefits everyone--the hotel's power bill is somewhat reduced, there's a good chance it might make some extra money in the restaurant (if the meal ends up costing more than the voucher), and the guests get exercise.

If all facilties that had cardio equipment used them to generate power, that would be beneficial both economically (saves on the power bill) and environmentally (less fuel burned).