January 13, 2005
time enough for countin'
1/13/05
"Say, Ian, didn't you win $600 off twenty bucks a few weeks ago?
Why, yes. Yes I did.
"Mind telling us what you did with the money?"
Why, no. I always believe that money you get through windfalls like gambling and Bank Errors In Your Favor should be spent on nothing but fun stuff, you know, assuming your rent is paid. In 1993, when Wachovia accidentally gave me $200 (just like the Monopoly card) I bought a leather bomber jacket I'd been coveting forever, even though I was broke. Tessa informed me last year that it is "way too 1980s" and made me give it to Housing Works.
Anyway, here's how that $600 got pumped back into the economy!
$100 to pay for Tessa's pre-natal workout. Yessir, she got to bounce around on her big belly and do weird sit-ups and god knows what kind of grundle exercises to make her rock solid and ready to pump iron on April 2. Get your tickets now!
$100 to my shrink. I got a good hour in which I complained yet again about my childhood, worried that I was going to be in agonizing sleep deprivation when the baby is born, and wondered when this all stopped being about ME ME ME.
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$200 for the new Adidas One shoes for Tessa. That's right, that shoe with the computer in it. This was supposed to be my Christmas present to her, but Adidas delayed the release until February, which was nice, because I pre-ordered it and now I can actually pay for it. This shoe is going to make her post-partum life AWESOME because it also TELLS FUNNY JOKES and GIVES YOU BACKRUBS and WRITES POETRY.
$100 to MercyCorps for tsunami relief. Yeah, that wasn't so fun, but when you win $600 on the same day so many people were swept to sea, you have to do something. MercyCorps came well recommended - friends of friends work there - and donating online was easy.
The rest for baby shoes and Carolina crap. When I said that old gambling phrase "baby needs shoes," I wasn't kidding, and carried that money all the way to Chapel Hill where we bought the Nikes for Newborns with an awesome Tar Heel logo on the side. Our kid is going to look SO RAD in these, and it's going to make Lindsay's kid cry 'cuz we're so much cooler.
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We also got a Carolina bib, a mini basketball and even cute drool-proof refrigerator magnets. GO HEELS!
Posted by irw at January 13, 2005 11:35 PMre/ $100 for tsunami relief -- this bangkok resident surrounded by tragedy (though feeling insanely lucky to have her whole family intact) says THANK YOU for thinking of everybody over here. $100 goes a looong way in these parts. khawp khun mahk eek khrang kha, khun ian.
Good job! Both pairs of sneakers look way cool.
Can never have enough UNC gear. As a New Yorker, you've already learned an important lesson --to raid wal-mart, goody's, and other stores south of the mason-dixon so as to load up on the baby's stash of baby blue apparel and accoutrements. You're safe with low-tops for a few years; I think baby and kid ankles (thankfully) are mostly pliable and cartilaginous, not like mine and your ever-stiffening counterparts.
Start with lay-ups (good angles only), teach it to use the backboard, and encourage rim-rocking. LullaBYE!
My baby boy is due June 22, so I've still got months ahead of me, but I picked up a very cool baby bag in the perfect shade of Carolina blue yesterday. It's got some nifty features, and hey, Oprah recommended it. You might want to take a look at it:
http://www.fleurville.com ("Blue Chocolate" Mothership)
http://www.fleurville.com/mothership.asp
http://www.pokkadots.com/itemsDetail.cfm/item_num/FL-BC/pcid/69/cid/56
Man, I wish I had parents like you when I was growing up! I never had cool shoes until I was old enought to buy them myself. I'm a big fan of the Nike Shox... I wonder how these Adidas compare.
Tim, I too am a fan of the VC Nike Shox:
http://www.xtcian.com/arch/001269.php
I own like four pairs (all off eBay).
Wow! the Republican, trickle-down economy at work! go ian and tessa. keep on spending, this economy needs some more help!
Ian, There was a sparkle in my eye, and I know somewhere there was a sparkle in Grandmother Suber's eye as well, when I read your blog this morning. We would like to think we had a little something to do with your taste for comsumerism as sport and the understanding that only having $40.00 to your name does NOT mean you shouldn't buy the $40.00 Squirt Gun with a 100 yard range and adjustable blast settings. Of course, I'm going to have to be more frugal to insure that I can continue the Grandmother Suber legacy and be the Uncle Salem that slips a twenty in your kids pocket when we visit.
We catered the Tsunami Relief telethon for the Red Cross in Atlanta, so we made our donation to their Tsunami Relief efforts. Despite their size and complaints after 9/11, the Red Cross is a powerful force in relieving human suffering. I have great respect for the men and women I have worked with in Georgia.
Can't help wishing you'd been moved to provide a photo of Tessa's pre-natal workout. You know, I just think it would have made for some entertaining blogging. Not that I didn't enjoy the photos of the kicks (er, I mean sneakers. Whoops, I think my age is showing here).
I just realized that this comment comes off like I might have a weird fetish for pregnant women exercising or something. The sad part is that without the photo, I'll never really know whether or not this is true. Sniff.
P.S. The cool baby shoes remind me of one of my more scarring childhood experiences: the time I was 5 years old and my ENTIRE family all bought matching Puma sneakers. Unfortunately, as the kid with especially narrow feet, I was the only one who ended up with a pair of Keds. So we all walked out of the store with them in their cool, matching shoes, and me with a pissy attitude, wearing my dorky Keds. It totally sucked. I felt like the outsider of the family. It was an oddly prescient moment though....hmmm.
Don't you think you're forgetting someone?
Oh yeah, I forgot to tell Uncle Sam I seceded.
To encourage donations, Congress recently passed a special law making tsunami donations tax deductible in 2004, even if they are made in January of this year. Typically, if you file an itemized return and want to deduct your charitable contributions, you can only deduct the contributions you made in that tax year. The tsunami hit on December 26, 2004. Under the normal rules, you would have had to make a contribution by December 31, 2004, to deduct it on your 2004 tax return. The new law gives you until the end of January to make a tax-deductible tsunami contribution for 2004. The new law applies only to tsunami donations and only to monetary contributions.