I've heard good things about Ketamine.
I would buy a yacht.
I'm probably going to buy a dinghy anyway - something about fifteen feet, that can take an outboard and fit on a trailer - but for a splurge I think I'd buy a little cabin cruiser. You can get a four-berth 22-footer in fairly good condition second-hand for under five grand. I'd buy that, spend another fifteen hundred on getting a proper radio, decent safety kit, and some training for myself, and sail it at the weekends.
Maintenance and storage are what get you with boats.
I'm still looking, in a remote kind of way, for a few acres of forest near a state forest. Or a leased state forest cabin.
We're splurging on a new bathroom. On the other hand, the tiles originally fell off the wall in the Spring of 2023, so it stops feeling so much like a splurge when it takes this long to materialize.
A "treat" and a "splurge" are two different things IMO.
A treat is ice cream ($5-10), or a greater quantity or quality of alcoholic drinks than usual ($10-20). Which one of those I'd prefer depends on what time of day it is and what I've already eaten.
A splurge is spending $100+ on a hobby or special event. For me that would be Magic: the Gathering, which I've got back into in recent months. That's probably not generalizable. A big Lego set, maybe? Some of those cost multiple hundreds of dollars and could keep one person or a family busy for hours if they're interested. Cassandane and I are trying to go to a burlesque show while the kid is out of town ("trying" because two have been scheduled but cancelled so far), and that fits the definition of a splurge.
I guess the upper bound on a splurge is what you can afford, which would vary, but anything that would cost over $1,000 sounds too complicated to really be fun or relaxing to me.
Bathrooms cost more and are relaxing compared to holding.
If we're talking a smallish splurge, I tend to get accessories for my bike (new grips) or my clarinet (new barrel.). Shiv buys board games.
How is a barrel not the whole clarinet?
Maintenance and storage are what get you with boats.
Yeah, true. That's why I'm probably getting one that I can keep on a trailer in the back yard (no storage costs), but maintenance will still be a thing no doubt, especially with an outboard.
My kids are into rowing and they want a boat (2 person scull). I told them if I make some unrealistic amount of money in the next year I'd buy it. If I actually do make that much I guess I would follow through?
The barrel is the second joint from the top. It looks like a barrel. And they're all Theseus' clarinet eventually.
While on leave back in the states I've been splurging on DVDs and Blu Rays that I can't get through my university library. I'm up to about 60 now. Before I left I splurged on some old movie posters including this beauty https://posteritati.com/poster/26952/stalker-original-1981-french-grande-movie-poster since I've not really spent any money at all on decorating since I've been overseas. This may have been a premature splurge as whether or not our contract is renewed is now in doubt so I may be there only another 3-4 years.
I don't really have the time to take advantage of most splurge type purchases. But, assume the sort of things that wouldn't require a lottery win:
* A bespoke steel frame bike. Something with decent tyre clearance for gravel type riding, but definitely optimised to be quick and comfortable for long-ish rides when carrying someone who isn't a skinny 20 something.
* A really nice steel string acoustic guitar. I don't have one. I only own a couple of electrics and a cheap-ish classical guitar. But I'd like something that could take all kinds of fancy tunings for modern fingerstyle guitar.
* a turntable and a set of active speakers for the home office (which is really a corner of our bedroom).
If it was for the whole family and not just for me:
* some kind of holiday cottage or RV hire deal where we could go away a few times a year.
13: Thanks. I guess I should know that because I was supposed to have learned how to play a clarinet.
I often want to create a reward system for myself to accomplish some unpleasant task or establish a habit, but I can't think of a reward. I do sometimes like fancy clothes but I get paranoid that the item will sell out if I set my heart on it and then have to wait for 3 months.
I would like a really nice navy blazer for my times of performative businessness. My old one is too small and shows its age too much.
My one regular luxury splurge is fancy hand soap. I like the Compagnie de Provence Savon de Marseilles soap in Pamplemousse (kitchen) and Fleur de Coton (bathroom). M likes Aesop, but it smells too strong for me, and I don't like the bottle (too dark). I like Byredo, but while I'm willing to overspend on hand soap to some extent, I'm not actually rich enough or crazy enough to spend $70 on something that's literally going to go down the drain.
19: My bargain splurge hand soaps are the Trader Joe's grapefruit and their orange blossom soap. The latter gunks up a bit and Tim doesn't like it as much, but neither dries out your hands.
We get little tablets of hand soap. You dissolve them in water to make soap.
Also -- it got hot in LA over the past week, and I was thinking about how heebie said she started going to the river regularly in the summer, in order to make the heat something to enjoy and look forward to. I hate the summer, and I'd like the incorporate this idea into my life but have no idea how. (I only like swimming in the ocean, and the ocean in LA is too cold and too many gridlocked freeway miles away to make it an enjoyable treat.)
re: 17
I tend to buy small bits of music equipment, records, or stationery (ink, notepads, etc) that fall under the £100 or so mark.
If you don't have a problem using it, marijuana products are nice. Trouble is now I can legally get like ten doses of an edible for $15, so it would pile up if I got anything regularly.
I just got two THC seltzers, one with PBR branding, the other Lagunitas. At a glance, a symptom of our fallen world, but they turn out to be sort of in between smoking & eating in terms of time needed to take effect & duration of effect, both. Also a lighter high than the average edible. So not bad overall.
Also watch out, because the cans I picked were 10mg THC, which was a good dose, but there were other brands that unaccountably contained 100mg. How do they imagine that would be consumed? In shot glasses?
I need to find good splurges again - my go-to was board games or a new indie roleplaying game, but when they build up in shrink wrap, I wind up berating myself about how wasteful it is to pick things up and not use them.
Foods might work, but I don't really restrain myself when I grocery shop - particularly if it's something that we'll both eat. And if it's too much prep/too involved, it doesn't feel like a splurge even if it's expensive.
I am reading some of the books in my to-read stack. Amanda Podany's history of the ancient near east is beyond fantastic. Also East Face of Helicon, by ML West. I have a pirated PDF, actual book's price is surprising. My son got me a deeply idiosyncratic book about the Bhagavad Gita, My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik, which I'm liking a lot.
My local store is carrying a great local fish again, too big for my normal dinner of 2 or 1 so I invited a friend to share.
About bicycles-- a frame is good, but IMO the real gains are from good wheels. Mavic has stopped making the fantastic price:quality Aksiums, but someone sold an unridden pair nearby recently, so now I have something to replace my no longer quite true rear wheel. Ttam, I am also not a small guy, and these are bombproof. I was going to get Ksyriums, which cost more.
If money's no object, maybe art. Inka Essenhigh is very nice. I caught a nice swing band in Chicago last weekend, didn't wind up going to the outdoor performaces at the bandshell in Millenium Park. I would like to see Baobabs.
Yes, legal weed is nice. I still can't believe that you just walk into a shop, choose, and walk out.
This was nice to read, reminder of Margaret Mead's idea that healed femurs are the first trace of civilization.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310
Also, this is a thoughtful and well-informed blog:
https://westnorth.com/
If money's no object, maybe art
I want an original John Lurie so bad. Maybe I'll spring for a print some day but movie posters will have to do for now (my rule is I have to love the movie and the poster).
I think I've told this story here before, but at the beginning of the pandemic we bought several tins of Camino weed gummies. But M left them in his car and by the time we remembered them they had melted into huge solid single pucks. We cut them up into approximate single-serving-sized pieces, but it turned out that the THC hadn't distributed itself evenly during the melting-and-resolidifying process, so it was a real crapshoot what you'd get -- a raspberry lemonade nothing or stoned out of your gourd.
If you don't have a problem using it, marijuana products are nice.
I resolve to smoke pot more often. That might sound silly, but I only can/want to smoke outside, so it's uncomfortable in the winter. Even in the summer I don't want to do it when the kid is around, because it would be inconsiderate to Cassandane to make her deal with all bedtime problems. But those have been greatly reduced in recent months, and the kid isn't even here right now, she's with her grandparents. So let's go get stoned!
I'd also like to try edibles at some point, just for the experience. That's not an option literally right now, but is something to add to the to-do list for the summer.
Obviously this state is ass-backwards forever, but Reddit is always talking about Delta 8 and other THC workarounds which aren't (yet) illegal here. But they're sold in grimy head shops which makes the whole thing hard to explore. I'm not curious enough to really work for it, but I can imagine the bicoastal elite version for a treat.
I'm kinda sick of having a state government that wants to punish its residents, tbh. Can't see us moving, but still sick of the state government.
29: I still need to show my ID, and usually they scan it in some way.
33: The New York Times gave you a recommendation. Op-eds are endorsements.
36. Here as well, but it's no longer a clandestine meeting to buy something uncertain. Here's a movie poster celebrating the US's craziest regulatory regime for this:
https://www.jozefsquare.com/product/machalek-oklahoma-crude/
I like to go to bookstores as a minor treat. Very occasionally I'll even buy a book.
I have no idea what I could splurge on, and I arguably have resources I could splurge with. I feel like I barely have time or energy for my existing hobbies and I mostly look at the gear involved and feel bad about not using it enough. Travel would involve navigating a minefield of home obligations. I wish I enjoyed cannabis, but since legalization I've discovered that I go directly from "no effect" to "unpleasantly dizzy" and no part of the experience is an improvement over being sober.
i'm treating myself/protectively crouching away from the raging torrent if horribleness by reading a lot in french - it has a sort of turbo charged separation from outside world effect for me that english doesn't always achieve. so currently about half thru re-read marcel's world, & recently read violaine huisman's les monuments de paris (v good) & laure murat's proust roman familial (wild & excellent). going to the library tomorrow to check out celine minard's so long luise.
I got dumped on with billable work, which is helpful.
Maybe I'll try delta 8. I have, so far as I know, never used THC.
Don't bother with delta 8. It's a dull and empty buzz. The methadone of cannabinoids.
Sadly, much as I love the weeds, edibles just don't get the job done for me. At least not in quantities that make any kind of economic sense at all. I think I just don't absorb well by that route.
THC workarounds which aren't (yet) illegal here. But they're sold in grimy head shops
You can get regular d-9 anything you want mailed directly to your house. From perfectly legal companies in Texas even.
It may have been delta 9 that the guy in the bar said was weed. I was pretty drunk.
yeah, D8 was shorthand for that whole class of I Don't Know What I'm Talking About.
I think Tri Delta is something different.
The magic loophole you want to search for is "THCa".
Unusually for me, I had a go at repairing something (rather than buying a replacement). I repaired a 20 year old 4th gen iPod. It needed a new battery and new storage (like most people doing this, I replaced the HDD with solid state). The stuff inside is fiddly and tiny but I managed not to snap any circuit board parts and one factory reset later the backlight came on and the thing worked! It's great!
Everything on it is so fantastically simple, you want to go back to 2004 and have a computers do over, only this time with an unbreakable rule that says that any list or other display of content must be both finite and at most only moderately long.
The real loophole is the friends you meet along the way.
Lo and behold, Texas Monthly writing about exactly this: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-legalized-marijuana-thc-delta-9/
I wish I was the kind of person who repaired things instead of just getting frustrated and throwing them away. I recently took out my melodica and found that one of the keys had gone flat. (Turns out that storing a musical instrument in the trunk of your car for four years isn't a great idea.) Tuning/repair would cost more than a new melodica. I found some youtube videos on DIY melodica tuning, but the very act of taking out the screwdriver and removing the back panel somehow made me very depressed. But I'm also not capable of actually throwing out a perfectly good musical instrument because of one flat key, so I guess it's my fate to house a useless out of tune melodica for the rest of my life.
Fixing things is something I enjoy. Less so when I'm repairing my bumper with gorilla tape, but that I have pulled apart the dryer's front panel, replaced a part, put it back together, and it runs gives me joy.
I have also changed ballasts in florescent lights and put in a new toilet.
I had to google it because I'd never heard of it before.
54: Yeah, it's been effectively legal for home use almost nationwide since the 2018 Farm Bill.
From the article: "What he's selling isn't marijuana, he tells me. It is hemp containing a chemical compound called THCa. Lighting it on fire transforms the THCa into another compound, THC--delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, to be exact."
Heh. Marijuana is also hemp containing THCa; way over 90% of the THC in any cannabis is non-psychoactive THCa until you heat it and knock off the carboxyl ring. The difference is purely regulatory, keeping the amount that transforms naturally below 0.3% of total weight at 30 days before harvest (after which, balls to the wall for 30 days), and in addition to growing conditions that help keep it low there are of course all sorts of ways to game the lab reporting (eg, including a bunch of stems and sugar leaves with your sample). The entire thing is a wink-and-nod exploitation of the Farm Bill formula just measuring existing THC and not adding the 87% of the THCa molecule that remains as THC after decarboxylation. Because it's (ostensibly) federally legal and the Hemp Act prevents states from interfering with interstate transport of it, pretty much every vendor uses USPS exclusively.
Gosh, cannabis sounds far too complicated. I had a bottle of beer last night with dinner. Opened the bottle, poured it in a glass, drank it.
You could have skipped one step and saved even more complexity.
This dumb volleyball anime is ridiculously enjoyable.
For our wedding anniversary, ms bill gave me a carving hatchet and I gave her an artist's pencil sharpener and an online course in which she'd expressed interest. These are splurges/treats in our world. Who knew that this year's appropriate gift was cutting implements...
Further to 39, I just bought When the Clock Broke. I very rarely buy a book new, but I was reading the part of Bring the War Home about Ruby Ridge and I realized that there is a fair amount of overlap between the two books and it would be interesting to see another perspective.
67 was me. And it only took about 10 minutes to sharpen the hatchet.
for a very small treat, the new elf lash extendr mascara is very unwilling to budge even if you, like me, will always chose emollients and sunscreen around your eyes over having mascara stay put.
I'm watching "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and honestly I don't think Aguirre is a very good leader.
They didn't call him Todd when he was alive, but maybe they only used his last name.
70: The inexpensive brand from the drugstore? I got some Ilia Limitless mascara that I like a lot, but elf is ridiculously affordable. Is it free of fragrance?
The little things that aren't quite rats are fleeing the ship. I wonder why.
That's probably enough for tonight. I'll watch the Fitzcarlo thing next year.
I looked it up, the emperor was named "Fernando."
76 - yep, drugstore elf. i haven't noticed any fragrance. have only been able to find black thus far, hoping to track down brown.
"Drugstore Elf" sounds like the term for a loiterer with bells on their shoes.
Oh, I make use of drugstore elf but haven't tried their mascara and am in the market for something that stays in its lane better. Thanks!
Miyoo Mini Plus or another similar tiny game emulator. $50 and it plays every video game made up to PlayStation One. $150+ will get you a thing that'll also play GameCube and PS2.
Miyoo Mini Plus or another similar tiny game emulator. $50 and it plays every video game made up to PlayStation One. $150+ will get you a thing that'll also play GameCube and PS2.