Opportunity Cost

"The word 'opportunity' in 'opportunity cost' is actually redundant. The cost of using something is already the value of the highest-valued alternative use. But as contract lawyers and airplane pilots know, redundancy can be a virtue. In this case, its virtue is to remind us that the cost of using a resource arises from the value of what it could be used for instead."

David R. Henderson

Opportunity Cost

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Library of Economics and Liberty

2008

This will be a post about my cousins, and about opportunity cost. 

If you are a loyal reader, you already know that 1.5 weeks ago, I spent the weekend with my BFF and her family down Indianapolis way, for the purpose of celebrating Alex's birthday with him for the first time in his life. He turned 11. While I was walking out the door, I got a text message from a cousin inviting my family to a barbeque. I declined for myself (obviously), but my parents attended the barbeque and came home with this:

This is a disaster clean-up kit. It's so official that it says "gift" in two languages. Besides an unfamiliar-to-me bottle of surface cleaner and degreaser, the contents are a hard-bristled scrub brush, a bottle of bleach, rubber gloves, and some plastic bags. It came with a box with the same logo on it, which contained a broom and a mop. 

I would not trade playing Fruit Ninja on a larger-than-life screen, geocaching with Alex, or grading papers with my BFF for anything. Even for this bucket. That's not to say that I don't wish that the barbeque (which I keep misspelling, but now I'm attached to my own special spelling of barbeque) had happened on a different weekend. I can assemble my own bucket, albeit without the super official logo. 

In case you don't remember your basic Wealth of Nations (free for Kindle!), the official bucket and the time spent with my cousins is the opportunity cost for my miniature road trip to Indy. 

A different cousin of mine recently posted the following wisdom on facebook:
"The reason why nothing ever happens is because people are too worried about what might be better." Pasting his quote from his facebook timeline totally messed up my font, but is legal because it is less than 10% of his facebook timeline, and I am also going to encourage you to support his photography business by inviting you to like his facebook page. 

As I try to find gainful employment, this concept haunts me because I may be passing up the opportunity of a lifetime and substitute teaching hoping for a call from elsewhere that may or may not ever come. I have the sudden urge to watch Sliding Doors and read Gut Symmetries.

However, as you know, I still have upwards of 200 pages left in 1491. 

What are the opportunity costs in your own life?

Time is Running Out!

time to compose my post, that is1as you can see from the lack of capitalization and end punctuation, i am composing this  post on my ailing t mobile sidekick, beezlebub.
i just cannot tear myself away from the women's individual gymnastics and now|swimming.
i also cant see any cursor communicating is going to prove difficult for me.
time is also running out because there are less than three weeks left of my seven day weekend, before i report back to the front lines of public education in america.
dare i mention it? at this point, it should be self-explanatory: time to learn the skills that will help us thrive in the upcoming New World Economy...is running out.
I think me figuring out how to effectively use
 the buttons on Beezlebub to write a blog post is one of the horsemen, isn't it?
What Have We Learned?
Well, from evaluating Dana's readiness, I have learned (as if I didn't already know it)that I
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I couldn't take it! I had to get up from in front of the TV and switch to the real computer before my phone met with an unfortunate accident involving the bow window. >[

I have learned as if I didn't know it already that, in no uncertain terms, I am ready to move to a place within easy walking distance of a large body of fresh water so that I can not only stay alive but also to, as Miss Gokey says, "Calm my anguish." I'm just putting that fact out to the Sensei in hopes that the Sensei will send me a magic banana.

So, I've been doing that. I've also nearly finished the first skein of yarn that I wrote about so long ago, about a month ago. If the Status Quo Economy survives to the Christmas season, I think I'll be buying my scarf-presents, not making them.

I have become close to obsessed with the idea of apple cider, and I resolve to make it in the fall.

Finally, I have been practicing using a specimen of post-automobilism transportation excellence by riding around on a Collegiate bicycle from the 1970s. The blue one is mine.

So, I'm getting ready to go: down the trail, back to school, to a lake.
And you should be, too. On that happy note, I remind you to check out The Wannabe while you're trolling the blogosphere today. Krista is offering travel tips, and she should have good ones: she's composing from China!

One week from today I won't be cycling anymore, because I'll be away from the flat land.
I'll be back in Las Vegas. Between here and there is a plane ride during which I will dive into a very juicy book that I can't wait to review for you all.

See how much I love you, loyal readers, that I would tear myself away from what may possibly be the last Olympics that the world will see within our lifetimes?

Oh, and as a final note: I heard that zombies dig on the brains of people who eat lots of Chik-Fil-A because their brains are nice and fat. And that's all I'll say about that.

Not to be confused...

Here's a valuable lesson I learned just now:DO NOT confuse James Wesley Rawles' official SurvivalBlog with the less scrupulous commercial site with the suspiciously similar URL. The latter will try to sell you a very handy magnesium firestarter for $12.95. We already know you can get the same thing on amazon.com for $5.

I went looking for James Wesley Rawles' site again today because this past weekend, I was able to help my friend Dana while she moved into her new house. WELL...now that I said that, I don't know how much I helped...I'll say I visited her while she was moving in and ate a lot of her cookies.

The sun doesn't set in MiddleO'Nowhere, Michigan until about 9 p.m., so it must have been around 10 or 10:30, when the noise of the crickets surrounded us as we sat around the fire, that I made the comment, "Yeah, I'm going to die in the first phase. There's no way I could live out here in MiddleO'Nowhere." I was pretty scared just thanks to the darkness and the crickets.

Fear aside, I also thought that Dana's new crib would be a pretty sweet place to be in the apocalypse, so I thought I would compare her property to James Wesley Rawles' "Criteria for Choosing a Retreat Locale in the Continental United States." I will concentrate on the positive. If you'd like to see both sides, the negative and positive, I have hyperlinked it for you.

• There is a source of water in the back yard.
• Plenty of sunlight for gardening (and grapevines for making wine!)
• Low to low-moderate ranking on the natural hazards scale
• Not in the path of real estate developers
• Not near any nuclear power plants

Combine with these basics the fact that the surrounding area is relatively away from major highways and also fairly pro-gun, I do declare that Dana has made a very good choice of home vis-a-vis the potential end of the world. I don't think she will have any problems, but I do suggest that food storage be her next apocalypse priority. :)

I would post a photo, but I'll have to add it in the next two weeks, because my T-Mobile Sidekick (aka "Beezlebub") has decided to force me to practice living without my handheld electronic device.

I can still play Fruit Ninja, and at the end of the day, that's what really matters. But it won't read my SD card, and neither will this AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor that I'm working with, either. (I used big words for the sake of using big words, but really I have no idea whether the processor has anything to do with the card readers, and I'm guessing it probably doesn't).