So I had some experiences with free, cheap, and more expensive this week, and I thought I would tell you about them.
Free: There is a free lunch, and I had it. Last week I joined a BYU alumni networking program called take a cougar to lunch. Its a pretty sweet deal, you as a student sign up for the program, they provide you with a database of BYU alumni from which you choose one that you would like to talk with. They then give you the alum's contact info, you contact them, and they take you to lunch and give you advice. For Free. Yeah that is pretty sweet. So Wednesday which was reading day, I went to lunch with Adam Clark, it was really awesome. He talked to me about his career which has taken many twists and turns, he told me what he thought about different options I am considering and he also looked over my resume and gave me some suggestions. It was really awesome, and we had DP cheesesteaks and subzero ice cream.
Elsewhere in the free category is a very exciting development, while scouring KSL and Freecycle for furniture and moving boxes my lovely wife discovered a pair of free rollerblades, just her size :) how happy is that? It is wonderful, it will be even more wonderful if she actually goes skating with me.
Last and perhaps least we got free slices of pizza from Brick Oven, for selling books back to some semi-sketch student entrepreneurs. Beats the bookstore anyway.
Cheap: While we are quite adept and free we are also very awesome at cheap. This entails skill in several areas, yard selling, my specialty, internet classifieds, Meagan's, and DI, which we are both fairly advanced in. Because we are moving to a fully unfurnished apartment we have been looking for a lot of things and we have found most of them in the last couple weeks as yard sales have picked up. We have also found things online and at DI. One of our favorite things to do is to think about how much we saved by not buying something new, now we also like to think about how much we saved by buying it used the right place, for example we bought a large fan at a yard sale for a dollar, we then saw those same fans at DI for 10 dollars, so we felt pretty special.
This week we had a new second hand buying experience, the BYU IT department has surplus sales every so often where they sale old computers and furniture for very low prices. This is the kind of event that you have to wait in line for in Provo. We were able to get several chairs for our new apartment for cheaper than DI prices.
More expensive: there are some things that you just can't really buy used, well maybe you can and I am just not advanced enough yet. One of those things is batteries, this time particularly car batteries. Ironically enough we happened to be leaving a yard sale when little Alberta's power source just gave up the ghost. Not a very happy moment for us. We did not know at the time why she would not start. Fortunately the yard sale was across the street from Jiffy Lube and they got us jumped and we went on our way. In the afternoon I took it over to an auto parts store and had them check it. Thank goodness it was not the alternator, I got a new battery and all seems well for now.
In situations like that where you can't get something for free or mostly free it is nice to have an emergency fund.
And that's the story folks, have yourselves a fantastic week.
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