I feel like I'm coming down with something, but I still need to go grocery shopping. I have no food. And even if someone else could do groceries for me, I have no idea the name of the soup I want (I only know what the box looks like and that it's in the kosher section).

I sponteously spent $50 on Amazon the other day, and I don't even feel guilty about it. I bought the Princess Bride on DVD since I was having so much trouble finding it, and the Sims since my copy isn't entirely legal and kind of doesn't work any more. My copy wouldn't uninstall, so I had to clean it out of the registry by hand, which I don't really like doing but I managed to do successfully. Then when I finished I found out that there's a utility to do that (It's called something like SimEraser and it's on the Maxis website). But anyway, I got a DVD and a game which is technically 2 games for $50, so that's fair.

I just finished reading Ten Lost Years by Barry Broadfoot. For those who haven't read it, it's a collection of oral histories of people who lived through the Depression in the 1930s. It was very interesting, although sometimes I found myself wondering if the stories were a wee bit exaggerated, but the storytellers lost all credibility to me in the last chapter. In the last chapter, they were discussing the long-term effects the Depression had on them, and some of them were mentioning how shocked and appalled they were about how people "today" ("today" is 1973 when the book was written) were so casual about spending money. They cited a parent who buys her son something that costs $25 and doesn't consider it a big deal when that was a month's income in the Depression, or the fact that a lobster dinner costs $8 (1973!) which could feed a family for over a week during the Depression. But don't these people understand the concept of inflation? I presume that at the time of the storytelling they were still living as functional adults in everyday society, so wouldn't they be aware that the value of a dollar is different? The mother who spent $25 on her son wasn't spending a month's income on him, she was spending $25 on him. Don't the storytellers ever go shopping? Shouldn't they be aware of what stuff costs? This one little thing changed the storytellers in my eyes from people with interesting stories about a historical event to whiny bitchy old people who are all grumpy because things aren't exactly like they were when they were young.