Gas is hovering around 2.50 a gallon, not to mention the beast that will get you there needs to be insured, lest some dingdong a quarter car-length away is getting their last driving texts in before the law passes.
The standard entertainment fodder, the motion picture, will set you back ten bucks a head (if you only see one feature while past the ticket kid) and they’ve even raised the matinee prices!
Dark times indeed, recessioneers.
I propose a day built around free entertainment you may have overlooked. Enjoy your public and city services.
Even if you’re not a ball fan, there is some romantic nostalgia about listening to a sporting event on the radio. Radio? Whats that? It’s something you’re practically issued at birth. The Windy City and St. Louis has representation on the dial, as well as our own River Bandits. Radio, incidentally, was the frequency to be on during the Swing marketing regime. You could still have some civic pride without the embarrassing visual that it was your team in the powder blue and the mascot was a sunglasses-wearing monkey who is an implied jazz enthusiast…or something.
If you flip over to the public radio side, you’re going to find premium music and entertainment programming. Some of these operas, classical music, news, and comedy/quiz shows cost 5 figures a year to syndicate in this town. They only ask that you toss them a few shekels during fund drive week. If you don’t remember when that is, they’ll kindly break into programming like an audio Jerry Lewis every five minutes to remind you. There’s a lot of great stuff out there floating in the ether if you’ve got a decent command of the weekly program guide.
Most cities, like Davenport, have multiple parks. I have never driven by Vanderveer and not seen people having a good time at any given hour of the day. If you consider physical fitness a good time, there’s more than enough of that in store if you have a decent pair of running shoes. Borrow a Frisbee from someone and toss it around in one of the city’s numerous Frisbee golf courses. In general, most of those outdoorsy types are some pretty mellow cats, so don’t worry about cliques. And as far as flora and fauna, if you’re over 16, gasp, it may cost you a DOLLAR to gawk at the displays!
I’d be remiss to not mention the greatest entertainment savings of all, your local library. Preaching to the choir, I know.
“But Froogs, how would I get there,” says the cynic. Davenport Citibus is free on Green Saturdays.
Those two cups nobody wanted from this morning have lost their aroma and flavor as a straight beverage. They’re not good for anything except tomorrow’s 6AM supercharge, with the characteristic post-slurp wince.
On a non-librarian note, why do children’s book romanticize the innocence of the ilde days of youth spent blowing apart the tops of dandelions? They don’t need any help! These sinister cold-blooded pests are designed in a sadistic laboratory as the most pure mechanism of mass-dispersal and reproduction since Captain Kirk played a Barry White record for the Tribbles. Let us all hope a James Bond supervillain does not harness any of the design specs of the dandelion for biowarfare.
While the Frugal Librarian, or as we affectionately call him, “Froogs”, is psyched about the release of Window’s Vista’s successor, Windows 7, later this year, there is a very good and super-affordable alternative called Ubuntu to tide you over. You may have heard words like “open-source” and “Linux” get tossed about by your bespectacled acquaintances. The benevolent nerds of the world in the spirit of competition put together very sophisticated quality pieces of software that benefit you for absolutely no cost. Sometimes they rival packages that cost hundreds. Though the 2010 census may prove me wrong, there are more Homo Sapien Nerdicuses in the world than there are Microsoft employees. Ubuntu is such an innovation.
You say you want to make your money go further, but how much conviction do you have to go through with it? Doubtfully not as much as these people.
It was a wonderful Sunday to spend outdoors, provided you’re the star of a murder mystery set in turn of the century London. Idle away the afternoons of the April-May monsoon season with a couple picks from DPL.
What’s more frugal than economy of thought?