Year: 2003

A couple of years ago they opened a Target store in nice strip shopping center on the south side of town. There is a Goody’s, Michael’s and a year later they built Pier 1 on the end. Plus there is also smaller strip in there with a few more stores. About a month ago they started building something on the end of Pier 1. This store was bigger than everything in the shopping area, but the Target. There were rumors of a Best Buy awhile back, could this be it? Tonight while in Michael’s we asked the clerck what was coming and she replied, “Petsmart.” Both Donna and I sighed. The clerk laughed. She said that our response was typical of all the responses she got when giving that answer. I guess we would have answered differently had we been pet owners, but there already is one of those stores (Pet Warehouse, maybe) a mile up the street. We really need a Best Buy or Circuit City. The closest place to find those kinds of stores is in Augusta, 25 miles away. The only place you can buy any computer stuff is Staples for crying out loud.

And it ain’t Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to this morning’s paper around 13 million people watched Barbara Walter’s interview with the Senator. Which is approximately half the 25 point something million chuckleheads that tuned in to see Barbara Walter’s interview Monica Lewinski a few years back.

It is really tough to get tickets to the actual tournament unless you know somebody with an in or want to spend big bucks on scalped tickets. When Donna and I moved down here practice rounds were sold on the day of in unlimited amounts. We are not golfers, but not going to Augusta National when you have a chance would be like living in Indianapolis and not attend the 500. We went for the first 3 years on Monday because it was always the least attended day. After the third year the crowds were getting so big that they decided to limit the practice round tickets to a certain number (they’ve kept that a secret) by having a ticket lottery. For the next 3 years we got tickets, but for the last 7 we have been shut out. A lot of other locals that used to go regularly have also not gotten tickets in a while. There is a lot of speculation that out-of-town applications get special treatment because that way more money is pumped into the local economy. There have even urban legend type talk of people putting their out-of-town relatives addresses on the applications and they have gotten selected for tickets.

The reason I’m ranting about this April event now, is that in today’s mail, I got my application to get in the practice round ticket lottery. I am seriously considering putting my Mom’s Connecticut address on there to test the theory. It is not that I’m really desperate to get in and see the golfers or the course again, but I need a new hat. My hat from 7 years ago is getting disgusting looking. I’ve checked eBay and can’t find the right one – just the word Masters in script with no flag or year.

Last night we made it 45 minutes into Welcome to Collinwood before turning it off. This morning we only got to the 30 minute mark of All or Nothing. This got me to thinking just how many of the movies I’ve picked from Netflix have we not finished watching. Because I’m that sort of anal retentive person I have a spreadsheet that keeps track of every movie I’ve rented and how long I kept it before watching it and how many movies we average watching in a month. I went back and ran through the list and added another column for the DNF (Did Not Finish) marking. I had to look up some of them so I could remember them, but I think I got a pretty accurate count. Turns out it is pretty damn close to 20% of the movies rented were not watched all the way through.

Here is the data:
1081 Total Days Member
236 Total Movies Watched
47 Movies Not Finished
19.9% Percentage Of Movies Not Finished
6.5 Average Movies Watched Per Month
$3.23 Cost per Rental
18 Average Days Out