embarrassment of riches

[dragonlady7]

At home I have a metal canister I found somewhere-- it's the canister part of the tank you use to develop black and white film by hand, but without the light-tight elaborate rubber lid, it's useless. Somewhere, God knows where, I have one, a whole one, that I remember buying, and also a pair of metal reels around which to wind the film, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you where I put them.

Anyhow. This canister, useless for its intended purpose, has been repurposed as a change jar. In college we called it The Slushie Fund, and visitors to the house, mostly underaged, would put money in it, which we would then (being of age) take with us to the liquor store, to buy booze for our parties. Although mostly we threw the sort of parties where people would have one drink or maybe start in on a second one, but forget about the drink and wind up doing something inexplicable and strange. We very rarely managed to achieve actual drunkenness-- but not for lack of booze.

Lately I don't have any parties, or underage friends. So the jar has been re-repurposed. I keep change in it for the bus. Quarters. And I also, once I accumulate a lot of tip money, start collecting bills in there to deposit at HSBC's ATM. But I am so lazy I won't go unless it's a sizable deposit, and yet the ATM won't take more than nine pieces of paper within the envelope. So that means I have to collect hundreds and fiftes to feel useful. And then since I work three days and am off four, I do most of my spending during the four. At this point I only make deposits about once a month, really. So I stick twenties in there, and then take them out again and redistribute them. It's kind of an ATM inside the house.


I don't know why I'm talking about this but it seems like something mundane and concrete and strikes me as satisfying to describe. I appear to have lost all my wittiness or pithiness.

The quickest of checks suggests that it would be about $840 each way per person to fly from JFK to Oslo. Holy shit. And Oslo's not even where I want to go. Nor is JFK where I am.
*gazes mournfully into useless metal cylinder*

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

YIKES.
And here I thought it'd be cheaper since there are no school vacations right now.

I like the idea of a home ATM.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone with lots of experience booking international flight on a budget, I suggest spending a few good hours messing around with sites like orbitz, priceline, and cheaptickets, trying out different dates for both the there and back flights, etc. My first attempt at Orbitz yielded Buffalo-Oslo-Buffalo for $707 (that's with taxes.) You might be able to get something slightly cheaper, but I think that's the order of magnitude you're looking at.