Made a withdrawal at the bank and discovered later that 18 of the bills were my Where's George bills. This is the most bills I've ever gotten back. These bills were probably the ones I used at the gas station across the street from the bank. I recognize one of them at least. On the plus side, this shows that banks do not send stamped bills back to the Fed to be destroyed, so the rude cashier at Borders in Paramus did not know what she's talking about. On the minus side, bills that I get back do not add to my WG stats and I'll have to spend them again.
After I bid for and won a Sanyo SCP-4900 phone for $10, I checked eBay again and saw the same phone for $5. So I bid for that too and won it uncontested. So that's two phones for $15. I'll use one and keep the other as a spare. It's funny when you think about it. 3 years ago, this phone was state of the art. (or at least the low end of state of the art) Now, I'm getting it for less than shipping just because it is not the latest razor-thin model. Tech products tend to have poor resale value.
It was raining last night, so I was wondering whether I should go out and get the Sunday paper. Well, I'm glad I did because it had a bumper crop of coupons! I used the Popeye's coupon from the paper to get 20 pieces of chicken this evening. (Of course, the Popeye's folks, who know me by name already, gave me another sheet of 16 coupons! Looks like I'll be having lots of chicken again in January, just like I did in December.) Then I went to the A&P to use a bunch more coupons that happened to match up with this week's sale items. Looks like I won't run out of soup or frozen dinners either this month. Couple this with yesterday's free Lean Pockets and I'm experiencing significant consumer surplus.
One disappointment I had with OpenOffice.org 2.1 is that OOo Calc is painfully slow when drawing a line chart with 1,600 data points. It's a problem because that's how much data I have in my Where's George history since around May 2002. So I tried the Windows build of Gnumeric instead. Incredible! Compared to OOo Calc, Gnumeric is a speed demon at charting. The chart properties interface, however, is a bit quirky so I had to RTFM to find out how to customize the chart labels, title, and legend. I also need to find out how to edit dates as dates instead of as numbers, but all in due time. As a plus, Gnumeric imports OOo Calc spreadsheet files rather easily, so I could use OOo Calc for data entry and Gnumeric for charting.
The chart shows my Where's George hit rate vs. time. It's been going down since 2004, although a decline of less than one percent a year isn't that bad. Looks like I really did need a new stamp. :)