Seeing the Twin Cities...without prying open My Wallet

In the last 6 weeks, I have visited the Twin Cities’ Model Train Museum, the Bakken Museum, a Vikings pre-season game, Fort Snelling State Historical Site, The Minnesota State Fair, The Renaissance Festival and Valley Fair. Owen was with me for four of these adventures, and Jennifer was with me during three of them. You might wonder: How does someone pay for all that stuff? Especially since there’s evidently no money left in the country anymore?

Here’s how:
First off, your friendly neighborhood library offers free passes to local attractions. So, I first picked up a ticket for the Model Train Museum. Admission to this museum is only four bucks, and Owen was free anyways, but, hey, I saved some cash.

Owen and I did the same thing for the Bakken Museum: Owen was free anyways, and I saved myself 7 big ones.

Jennifer and I got into the Vikings football game for free thanks to our soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law who thoughfully gave us tickets he was unable to use.

For Fort Snelling, I again tried the library. They only have a limited number of free passes each week, so there’s no guarantee there will be one when you want one. So I was rather pleased when I went in to the library one Monday morning and found a free pass waiting on the shelf. I took it to the front counter and attempted to check it out…but the clerk informed me I could only have one pass at a time and the Bakken Museum’s pass was still checked out to me.

“But I already went to that museum,” I whined.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, “You can’t check out another free pass until Wednesday.”

So, I did what any good cheapskate would do, instead of putting the pass back on the shelf, I hid it inside an obscure book on a lower shelf in the back of the library. I returned on Wednesday, walked up to my book, opened to the correct page, and pulled out the pass. The clerk then allowed me to check it out. On August 25th, then, Jennifer, Owen and I got into Fort Snelling for free…a savings of $20.

For the State Fair, I ordered tickets through my place of employment, which offers discounts on major events. Jennifer and I were granted admission for $16 instead of $22.

For the Renaissance Festival, I nabbed tickets for $8 a piece from a co-worker who also works at the Festival. As the normal cost of admission is $19.95, Jennifer and I were able to enter for $16 instead of $39.90.

Finally, my company buys out Valley Fair once every other year for the employees and three of their friends. Since admission is $37.99, and I got in for free, this was the best deal of the bunch.

So here’s what I spent on those six attractions for my own admission and Jennifer’s (when she accompanied me): $32.

And here’s what those same attractions would have cost without discounts: $170.89.

The List of Lists

One day, while completely befuddled by the high number of lists I maintain, a friend of mine asked if I have a list of my lists. I laughed and said that I do not. So, here, for fun, I’m going to correct that. But first, here’s a list of things I’m not including on the list: 1) Phone lists (even though I am the head of the department phone list at my job 2) Work-related items involving projects and/or trade secrets (they’re boring lists anyways) and 3) Temporary lists (such as: Things to buy at the grocery store).
I’ve added a brief explanation for lists with non-obvious titles. Anytime I use the word “we” it should be understood to mean “Jennifer and I”.

1. List of meals the company has paid for
2. List of free things I’ve gotten from the company
3. Wage history
4. Books I have read (this is probably the oldest list here)
5. Number of books I’ve read per year
6. Subjects of the books I’ve read
7. An alphabetical list of the books I’ve read
8. Mistakes I’ve found in books I’ve read (this list is 27 pages long)
9. List of Edgar Allen Poe works
10. List of Sherlock Holmes stories
11. List of books authored by Theodore Geisel
12. Short stories I own
13. The ultimate calendar (a listing of every event in my life for which the exact date is known)
14. Timeline of my life (a list showing when and for how long I lived in certain places, held certain jobs, attended certain schools and how they overlapped)
15. Residences I have lived in
16. Cities I have live in
17. People I have lived with (there are 12 people on this list…)
18. Vacations I have been on
19. US states I have been to
20. Countries I have been to
21. Times I have been on an airplane
22. What we did for our anniversaries
23. Days since we married that we haven’t seen each other
24. Jobs I’ve had
25. Schools I’ve attended
26. Concerts I’ve attended
27. Professional baseball games I’ve attended
28. Plays I’ve attended
29. What we did on our cruise each day
30. Cars we have owned
31. Lego pieces I own
32. Board/card games we own
33. My 50 All-time favorite motion pictures
34. My 20 favorite TV shows
35. My 10 favorite albums
36. My 50 favorite songs
37. My 10 favorite non-fiction books
38. My 10 favorite fiction books
39. Motion pictures I have seen (there are 1,189 movies listed)
40. Number of motion pictures seen from each year
41. Motion pictures I have seen at the theater
42. Read the book…and seen the movie (I pick which I prefer)
43. Billboard #1 albums (1956-present)
44. Billboard #1 songs (1940-present)
45. Things that annoy me
46. Our ten year anniversary trivia quiz
47. Bart Simpson’s chalkboard writings
48. Best songs by people I know
49. Customer service (list of grievances filed with companies and what sort of recompense we received)
50. Deep Thoughts (from the SNL spot)
51. Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest rock songs of all time
52. Non-work money (list of money I have made outside of work, such as at garage sales)
53. Favorite quotes from 1984
54. Favorite quotes
55. Quotes from famous losers
56. Addams Family episodes
57. Battlestar Galactica episodes
58. Little House on the Prairie episodes
59. Northern Exposure episodes
60. Quantum Leap episodes
61. View Master reels I own
62. Mistakes we found watching “Voyager”
63. Wal-mart facts (notes I took while reading “How Wal-mart is Destroying America”)
64. Website traffic (I track the number of new visitors to my website each week)
65. Words to learn
66. Bible verses mentioning dogs
67. Partakers at JW memorial, 1980 – present
68. US religious census statistics
69. Money spent by the Watchtower Society each year on Circuit Overseers, 1980-present
70. JWs publisher increases/decreases, 1930-present
71. JWs versus world population, 1950-present
72. Survey results (I sent out a survey asking ex-JWs if they thought they were going to die at Armageddon)
73. Chemicals in the atmosphere
74. Nations of the world
75. National parks
76. Places I want to visit in Minnesota
77. Vacations I want to go on
78. Word of the year (I pick a new word every year that I had never known about before)
79. Self-created filmlets
80. Other videography projects (weddings, baptisms, etc, that we have filmed)
81. Filmlet commentary
82. Every email address
83. Goals for 2008
84. Passwords
85. Palindromes
86. Autonyms
88. Homophones
89. My book – chapters, pages and words
90. Wonderfalls episodes
91. Arrested Development episodes
92. Freaks and Geeks episode
93. Awful Truth episodes
94. Star Trek: TNG episodes
95. Star Trek: TOS episodes
96. Star Trek: Voyager episodes
97. Firefly episodes
98. Best Picture Oscar winners
99. Best selling motion picture from each year
100. This list

There.
I actually have less lists now than when I was a kid, thanks in part to the internet. For example, I used to have a list of where the Olympics were held each olympiad, but that seems pointless now as I could just look it up. You may have noticed that some lists aren’t very personal (such as “Sherlock Holmes stories”), but the reason why I have such lists is to check them off as I watch/read the items on the list.

Light Reading

Owen and I read books together nearly every night before bed. After a long period in which he would only allow me to read a handful of non-fiction books (with the exception of Where’s Spot?), he’s finally allowing me to branch out into his entire reading library.

Here are some things I’ve noticed, and some other things I’m wondering…

One book Owen owns is a thick book of nursery rhymes. I don’t often bring this one out for fear he’ll insist I read every rhyme in the book (and the book does put forth an ambitious effort to include every nursery rhyme ever conceived), but reading these bizarre, often scary poems as an adult now has me asking:
What’s with the three men in a tub? I mean, let’s set aside the strange amalgam of blue-collar professionals sharing such tight quarters, what I find weird is that, in any illustrative depiction of the poem, the men are invariably in a barrel floating in a body of water. What gives? Should the poem be three men in a boat? Did “tub” used to mean “a thing you float in”?
And while we’re on the subject of nursery rhymes, why is Humpty always portrayed as an egg? Nothing in the poem seems to indicate this. What’s more, Humpty is shown to be a MALE egg. Again, nothing in the poem itself tells us what gender Humpty is, and I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find something in the refrigerator that screams FEMALE! more than an egg.

Speaking of gender, one of our favorite books to read together is Wacky Wednesday. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the gender of the main character, despite the fact that he/she is shown on every single page – including one page in which he/she is naked but for a pair of socks. We never learn the protagonist’s name, and no one talks to him/her in any way that requires a telling pronoun. The boy/girl dons a pink shirt with jeans and sports hair going down just over his/her ears. Very cryptic.

Another Dr. Seuss book we read is Green Eggs and Ham. Here’s the funniest thing about that book: the pages are numbered. Yes, that’s right, despite the fact that there’s no table of contents or index, and despite the fact that the book can be read cover to cover in under five minutes, someone, somewhere along the way, felt it necessary to include page numbers. I guess, that way, when Owen comes to me with a confused look on his face asking: “Hey, where in this book does Sam-I-Am ask if his friend would be willing to eat green eggs and ham in a box or with a fox?” I can say, with precision, “Oh, that’s on page 22.”

You may not have heard of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, but in that book, a boy concedes to giving a mouse the above-mentioned dessert, only to have it escalate. The fun part is turning each page to see how it’s escalating. For instance, after eating the cookie, the mouse says he’s thirsty, so…(turn the page)…now he wants a glass of milk. Anyway, at one point, the mouse has drawn a picture and decides he wants to hang it on the fridge, so he needs…(drum roll)…Scotch Tape. You read that correctly: Scotch Tape. The first time I turn to this page, I felt cheated. Who hangs stuff on their fridge with Scotch Tape? Isn’t that why magnets were invented? It didn’t say he wanted a glass of Dean Milk, or a Nestle Toll House cookie. I searched the small print inside the front cover expecting to find something like “This book made possible by a grant from 3M”. No such luck. I hate when an otherwise good book does something stupid like pointless product placement.

In the book Where the Wild Things Are, we are told that Max is anointed “King of All Wild Things”. But I think a better title would be “King of All Run-on Sentences”. Here’s a doozy:

That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

…Yep, that’s right: 62 words spread out over 5 pages, and that’s not even the longest sentence in the book. I am certain this book has more pages than sentences. I keep looking at the cover, expecting it to say “written by Thomas Jefferson”.

In the matter of funky sentence structure, I was going to mention Corduroy, with it’s predilection for passive statements (e.g. try to sound natural when reading things like “Over it fell with a crash.”), but, instead, allow me to point out one of the book’s reviews, which is reprinted on the inside front cover. The first sentence begins:

A winning, completely childlike picture book in which a stuffed bear waiting hopefully in a toy department finds a home with a little black girl...

…Yes, you read that correctly: Corduroy goes home to live with a black girl. Unlike, say, the Sneetches, ethnicity has absolutely nothing to do with the story, so I’m not sure why the reviewer was compelled to tell us Corduroy’s ultimate friend is black, nor why the publisher deemed this the best review to print in this edition.

My white son and I look forward to reading more books tonight.