Helped somebody move today, and then went to Meijer to pick up a few things. Final totals:
8 Fruit Snacks
32 Froot Loops (11 oz)
1 2-liter Pepsi One (I found a Catalina someone had left behind for a free one)
9 Eckrich Smoked Sausages
6 Eckrich Polish Kielbasa
4 Tyson Chicken Strips
1 Gallon milk
Amount paid: $7.83 (most of that was for the Eckrich - it was B1G2F original price of $3.99 and I had .50/1 coupons (13 of which doubled), so the final price for 15 of them was $5.95
Froot Loops were on sale for 99 cents, and the Catalina deal where if you buy 4 of them you get a coupon for $4 off your next order is still going on. I did some organization of the General Store, so I thought I’d attach a picture of the Froot Loops and the ketchup from last week (final totals 160 bottles). There’s just something about stacking things 3 or 4 high that makes you feel like you have a store 
Stay tuned later on for a final posting of my totals for April - a little hint though - it was my best month ever.
Well, I managed to improve my EFC time by 15 minutes, to 27 hours 21 minutes. As seems to be the case with most improvements, it happened with a paradigm shift - where instead of making minor improvements to an existing route, I just tried something new. And as also seems to usually be the case, the improvement happened pretty much by accident. I was browsing through an older route that I had created and noticed that one of the lines I had written 54 miles when really it was only 8 miles, which dropped the time from somewhere in the mid 28s to 27:48.
So I took that and used some of the things I’ve learned about routes, and was able to whittle the time down to 27:21. I varied it again and came up with a 27:32 route. The basic gist of this new route is instead of taking the Turnpike from OH 66 across the top of Ohio, I get off at OH 4 and take that down to the middle-western counties (Wyandot, Crawford, Hancock, Hardin, etc). A variation of this route I think was originally proposed by Jim, back in the day.
ETA I shaved another 15 minutes off of it by taking Hancock and Hardin from the west instead of the east. 27:06!
Bought 6 packages of diapers at CVS today for free. So I got that going for me, which is nice. In other news, the Red Hot Death seem to be going down to utter defeat, which ain’t so fun.
Ever wonder what it might be like if Darth Vader had his own blog? Yeah, me too
To paraphrase Bill Simmons, there’s high comedy, there’s transcendent comedy, and then there’s Marty Brennaman reading off the Reds‘ trivia question and pronouncing The Notorious BIG as The Notorious “big”
Which is all not to mention his deadpan reading of the various rap song titles and lyrics, which was also quite classic. It scored at near-100 levels on the Unintentional Comedy Scale
Did you know that the word forte, when used to mean a strength of someone, should actually be pronounced like fort (as opposed to for-tay, which is how you pronounce the musical term that is spelled the same)
I did not know that till today
Okay so I did some testing of my EFC route. One of my problems is that although I have estimated times for several different routes, I don’t have a very good way of determining if my estimates are accurate (other than driving and timing them). The way I do my estimates is that I classify each road I drive on as one of several different “types”, and then give each type an approximate average speed. For example, Interstates - 60 mph, Divided Hwys 50, State and US routes 40, etc. Then I multiply the distance * this average speed and add them all up and get my total estimate.
Anyways, I did some testing of a local portion of my route this afternoon. I am posting it here not only for your fun and amusement, but also to save it for posterity:
Got off 71 South at 11:12, with odometer ending in 7.5
Went straight at the offramp, curled around past Home Depot and turned right onto Fields Ertel Road. Drove on there for awhile, and passed Butler-Warren road (and thus into Butler county) at 11:17 (odometer 0.0). There was a business right there for my turning around convenience, and I was back on 71 south at 11:20 (1.9).
So total for the detour was 8 minutes and 4.4 miles, or approximately 33 mph. I had estimated 12 minutes for this (4 miles at 20 mph), so that’s good. I will point out that if I were to come the other way (from 71 northbound instead of southbound), I think it will take longer, as I’ll have to turn left off the off-ramp and then left onto Mason-Montgomery, and to get back on 71 north I’ll have to go past the 71S onramp, through the M-M intersection and then left across F-E. That might be a problem, especially at a high-traffic time.
So, I caught the very end of Jeopardy today. Missed the final answer but the 3 responses were Cinncinnatti (sic), Cincinnati and Council Bluffs. Certainly somewhere on the Internet (Edited to add - of course) somebody has to be keeping track of these things, but it makes a somewhat interesting game to play - what could possibly be the Final Jeopardy answer where someone (and this was a tournament of champions) would guess Council Bluffs?
I recognize Council Bluffs from Mormon history, but then I can’t see how Cincinnati would be the right answer to any possible Mormon related question.
Curiouser and curiouser…
So Mark Mulder pitching 10 innings screwed up the gamescorer, which is apparently only built to handle one digit of innings pitched. Personally I blame Mike.
Totals for the family morning trip to Meijer:
1 Prescription ($10 co-pay)
2 bottles of kids toothpaste (no coupons grr)
35 bottles of ketchup
28 boxes of fruit snacks
8 boxes of 19.7 oz Froot Loops
Total spent: -$5.01 (overage mostly due to a $20 off gift card for any new prescription)
As I was roaming the aisles, I saw another lady with Froot Loops and ketchup in her cart - I had to restrain myself from giving her the secret couponers handshake