Penultimate Day, 2022

“Well, I simply observed, sir, that I’m felicitous since during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.” – Blackadder the Third

I wish there had been a sequel to “Lord of the Rings” starring Alan Rickman as an elderly Frodo.  It could have been titled “Old Hobbits Die Hard”.

First note: If The Mrs. is feeling well enough, her idea was that we should do our podcast on the eve of 2023.  I’m thinking 9pm Eastern.  I’ll post a note here before the show to remind everyone – and you can get that delivered straight to your email inbox if you subscribe.  Like the vaxx or putting river water in your socks, it’s easy and free.  Unlike the vaxx, 100% proven to not cause a heart attack, unless from laughter.

Penultimate Day.  This is a particular institution of the Wilder family.  It started over a decade or so ago.  The Mrs. was having problems with her Blackberry® phone (the one with the cool trackball) and wanted a new one.  I wasn’t working, and the closest place that sold phones with our carrier was 90 miles away.

So, we popped the kids in the car, and headed south to buy a phone.  We went to Best Buy®.  We ended up not buying the phone (the deal was awful) and decided to eat at Olive Garden™.  As I drove home, I decided to have fun with the kids, and told them that this was the Wilder holiday – one that no one else observed.

The next year, we remembered, and did the exact same thing.

What are the rules of Penultimate Day?

  1. Drive 90 miles south,
  2. Look at cell phones,
  3. Under no circumstances whatsoever, buy a cell phone, and,
  4. Have some Italian food a casual-dining chain.

That’s not a tough holiday.  I can testify that (with the COVID exceptions) the Wilder family has kept the spirit of Penultimate Day and have purchased exactly zero cell phones on December 30 of any year.

Our waiter this year spoke Spanish.  He asked, “¿Que past?”

This year, we had a different observation of Penultimate Day.  The Boy decided to go back to see some friends.  So, he headed back and specifically told us he’d be celebrating Penultimate Day with his friends.

That left The Mrs., Pugsley, and me.  The Mrs. has been feeling a bit down after her most recent bout with Ebola.  She said that Pugsley and I “should go”.  Now, if you have been married, you will recognize that there are exactly two ways a wife says that – the first is a deadly trap, indicating that “should go” is the last thing you should consider doing and that there will be much grumpiness.

But she meant it in the second way, the “I’m not feeling well and you boys should go and have a good time” sort of way.

So we did.

Pugsley drove.  The first Penultimate Day, he was a backseater, and now he was driving.  We ended up talking about various things on the trip, since he was far more interesting than he was a decade ago.  We talked about fatherhood, and what my goal had been with him.  It has long been my theory that if you can get a boy to 16, that’s the character they’ll take with them for life.  But getting them through the minefield of puberty to that character is the difficult part.

We talked about that.

The Mrs. and I are skilled at making the tough choices.

We made it to Best Buy©.  I can happily report we didn’t buy a cell phone.  I might have bought a cell phone case, but Pugsley immediately called me a heretic, noting that the provision for cell phone purchases should obviously be considered to be prohibited based on the emanations and penumbras of rule three.

Just kidding.  My phone is so old that it needs a pull-start and two-cycle oil, so they didn’t have it in stock.  Samsung™ has released at least ten versions since I purchased my phone, several versions of which have been nearly explosion-free.  So I bought a phone case on Amazon™ when we got home.  After midnight.

Just in case.

I found an old Nokia® and hooked it into a charger.  The power company ended up paying me that month.

An observation about Best Buy© itself – it was dead.  A decade ago, there were shelves of DVDs and CDs and video games.  There were a few dozen of each of those, but they were like the lingering holdouts.  Why would you buy a piece of physical media when you can just download it over the Internet?  That war is over, except for weird titles that are either typed up in legal limbo or aren’t popular enough to stream.

The televisions were amazing, and also not so much.  When I was a kid, watching the world on a 24” analog set, the idea of having a television that was five feet across was saved for the main screen on the Enterprise® in re-runs.  Now?  They’re cheap.  The coolest one there was a Samsung™ that, when turned off, looked like a painting.

That was cool.  As were the refrigerators.  They were (oddly) plugged in and running.  One of them was the current version of the fridge we bought seven or so years ago – and was $2,000 more than I paid for it.  You could also (oddly) get one with a streaming television in the door.

That confused Pugsley and I, since I didn’t think talking to my fridge would get my beer any colder.  Best Buy™ looked more like a visit from Penultimate Days’ past rather than a store that had anything we were much interested in.

I bumped into our fridge once, but it was cool with it.

Olive Garden™ (Motto:  when you’re here, you’re here) was pretty good.  I had the chicken and shrimp carbonera, and it was quite tasty.  We grabbed some to-go food for The Mrs., and headed home.  The Mrs. had hers, and then went to bed, since she was still not feeling good.

Although it was the most sparsely-attended Penultimate Day ever, I was mostly happy.  The one down note is that The Mrs. is still feeling a bit puny.  The up notes, though, were many.

Change is a part of life.  By slicing it up to review one single day a year, over the course of years, change becomes so much more observable.  The first change is in my sons.  Both have grown up, and both are past the danger zone of 16.  I’m proud of both of them.

The second change is in The Mrs. and I.  We’re growing older, too.  I accept that.  That is not a bad thing.  There is a sense of completion in that.  That’s not bad.

I know purists will say that Olive Garden® isn’t real Italian food, but I’m not Italian.  It’s tasty.  That’s been good over the years, though you can certainly see the prices going up over time, but still with unlimited stick.

And I’d give customers a penne for their thoughts.

In a few years, when Pugsley goes off to college, and The Boy is deeply involved in his own life, it will likely be down to just The Mrs. and I enjoying our family Penultimate Day together.

Well, and all of you.  Hope we all have a happy and wonderful 2023!

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

32 thoughts on “Penultimate Day, 2022”

  1. It’s been a decade or more since I went across town to eat at Olive Garden. I always enjoyed its non-keto goodness. I’d go today but both my wife and I are trying to put some curvature back into the current flatness of our backs while recovering from the flu. Maybe we’ll go tomorrow.

    This is my dad’s birthday, also a memory trigger for me.

    Here’s to making more good memories in 2023…and to hoping they’re not penultimate year ones!

  2. What are the rules of Penultimate Day?
    1.Drive 90 miles south,
    2.Look at cell phones,
    3.Under no circumstances whatsoever, buy a cell phone, and,
    4.Have some Italian food a casual-dining chain.
    Important Safety Tip:
    It is not recommended that you celebrate Penultimate Day in accordance with Rule #1 if you live in Anchorage, anywhere in the Hawaiian Islands, San Diego, Yuma, El Paso, Laredo, Brownsville, New Orleans, Mobile, or Key West.

    1. Akshually…
      I personally recommend a significant portion of the population of New Orleans do just that.

      Happy New Year, everybody!

  3. Why would you buy a piece of physical media when you can just download it over the Internet?

    You mean, besides they can’t auto-delete your media, like they do with somedownlaods on Kindle, or because they can’t force you to re-license the use and enjoyment of the content every year?
    Streaming and downloads are the wet dreams of Disney execs, because now they can sell you the same movie you bought year after year after year.

    So, how’s that annual license for Microsoft Office working out for folks?
    Other than that, if you’re fine with renting in perpetuity but never owning, and you like it, download away.

    1. You can protect yourself from auto-deletion of e-books from your kindle. Back them up on your real, live computer. Keep your kindle offline, except for when you’re purchasing something. And if they zap your book then, no problem — you backed it up.

      1. I don’t do Microsoft, but on my Linux machine, it’s pretty tough to get the Kindle to share files with the computer. The last I looked*, if I wanted to transfer files to my ancient Fire, I had to send them to Amazon and they’d send them to the Kindle after making copies for the FBI/CIA/Dog Catcher.

        The easy backup went away a few years ago when the ‘zon “improved” the Kindle OS.

        (*) A few days ago.

        1. My Kindle is of the “Oasis” persuasion, and it may be more cooperative than older devices. When I connect my Oasis to the desktop via USB, it simply becomes another drive, and I can transfer files back and forth in the usual way.

      2. And this is better and easier than buying it and owning it by just taking it home…how, exactly?

        The reason there’s no media for sale at Best Buy is because Amazon is eating their lunch, and they’ve given up. The whole chain is Fry’s Electronics five years ago. They’re dead, they just haven’t fallen over yet.

  4. John – We have a similar holiday, celebrating a rather obscure holiday post-Christmas but pre-New Year’s for the same reason: No one else does.

    A non-holiday specific holiday is actually a great idea. Just as you indicate, it allows one to focus on the people and not the hoopla (except whatever hoopla you choose to introduce).

    Best Buy – I literally cannot think of the last time I was in one, although they are around here. We actually drove by one just the other day. The crowds going in and out were low; I wonder if they will be a going concern in the not-too distant future.

    Movies – To Aesop’s point, I actually have had a song “removed” from my U-Phone which had been legitimately paid for but not for “my region” (whatever that means). I would buy more movies in physical content but frankly there are not that many movies that I want to see again at this point. I occasionally pick some up with exactly the thought that Aesop mentioned: it if it on the InterWeb, it can be removed.

    Olive Garden – Apparently just sitting down and having endless breadsticks and water is frowned upon for unknown reasons…

  5. At least BB has somewhat competent salespeople. We did WalMart for a few staples and a 2nd humidifier yesterday. Thought we stumbled onto the set of a Tarzan® movie.

    No OG in Viewfert. Can’t remember the last time I’ve been in one but do remember the snarky column by some NYC a-hole picking on an 80 yr. woman from Fargo who praised the new one there several years ago.

    1. Wal-Mart is awful in cities. In rural areas, the stores are neat and the clientele is everyone. In Houston, Wal-Mart just felt sad, like no one wanted to be there.

  6. I’ve noticed the snobbery toward Olive Garden. I think it started when an Italian son from the Bronx ventured out of the city, and became homesick for Grandma’s cooking. Nothing could compare to her cooking, even if he knew what he was eating was pretty damned good. So, Olive Garden was given a bad review and social media agreed to not agree forever.

  7. The Best Buy portion of your Penultimate Day protocol reminds me of when my son was in school and worked for Best Buy (or “The Den of Evil,” as he called it). He worked in the “back room,” fixing computers. But he knew the guys who infested the sales floor and sold computers. Best Buy applied a set of rather perverse incentives to those guys. Profit margin on the computers themselves was very minimal. The sweet, sweet money was made on selling protection plans. So the sellers of computers were assigned a percentage quota: 80% (or some fraction) of computer sales had to include high-margin protection plans, or the sales guy was in trouble. As you might expect, this led to those guys basically refusing to sell machines to people who weren’t buying The Plan. “We don’t have that one in stock today. Or that one. And sorry, not this one, either.”

    Computer servicing also presented hazards. One day, my son was putting additional memory into a desktop that had been dropped off by a middle-aged, uhhh, diverse couple. Work complete, the tech was supposed to road test the machine a bit, open a few files, etc. So, my son does this and opens some kiddie pr0n. He shows it to the manager, the manager calls the gendarmes, and Diverse Dude gets arrested when he comes to pick up the computer. I have to wonder just how stupid someone’s got to be, taking his computer full of illegal smut and dropping it off to be worked on. (Evil and stupid often go together, I think.) Meanwhile, my son’s seen something he’ll never be able to unsee. This world does have its crappy moments.

    2. Yeah, I think I’ve bought two items there in the last 10 years, and never did buy a computer from them. People are awful, and computers allow the worst to be magnified.

    1. Thanks! She is better. Turns out one of the meds she was prescribed caused the shortness of breath. Boom: better.

  9. Blessed to have two fine sons,
    Fine wife as my partner, life is GR8,
    May 2023 be the best ever…

  10. Well, I know some fairly liberal minded girls, but I’ve never gotten any Norman tongue! On the other hand, I’ve got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel…

    —
    We do stream for convenience, but the whole “you don’t own it” thing bothers me, so I’ve been buying up media at the goodwill outlet for a couple of years. (yeah, I get it that DVDs aren’t “owned” in the classic sense, you just get a license to display the content under a set of restricted circumstances- which is widely ignored.) At $1.25 a pound, you can get a bunch of DVDs for cheap. I’ve got over 600 ripped to our home server and at least that many more waiting for me to upgrade my hard drive. The biggest problem is that I ripped them by what was near to hand, rather than what we’d most like to watch, and the unripped disks are in storage. That means streaming Die Hard, when I’m pretty sure I own it somewhere. It’s very convenient to throw a portable drive in the bag when going on vacation with the kids and know you’ve got something to watch at the hotel (or the in-law’s house), if needed.

    I mostly pick up stuff I want to watch, but I always pick up stuff I think will be cancelled or never re-released. Got a Richard Pryor standup concert disk yesterday, and a couple of Gene Wilders…I think one was “Stir Crazy”. Classics.

    — Best Buy ripped off my aged parents on a computer upgrade, and I decided I’d never shop there again. Didn’t either for over 15 years. Did buy an AV receiver for a customer there this year when due to supply chain issues there was no pro-sumer level gear available anywhere. I ordered online, picked up in the parking lot. I was in a big hurry, and they had an acceptable unit, and were the only ones with anything reasonable in stock.

    I drive past the shuttered Fry’s stores fairly often and always feel a pang, but they were cr@p for a long time. The policy of reboxing returns s#cked, and their inventory problems meant that they were unlikely to have what you needed anyway for the last couple of years. Loved browsing the store back in the day. MicroCenter has filled in the gap- minus the large appliances.
    —

    Best wishes to you and yours John,

    nick

    1. Wait…Microcenter is a chain?
      LOL.

      The local one is picking up the slack from Fry’s, Radio Shack, and Best Buy. And even they have developed major suckage black holes.

      1. I was very surprised to find that there were Microcenter’s in Illinois many years ago. I thought they were just a store to prey on the IT staffs of the businesses downtown with convenience but high prices, and a focus on UPSs and replacement laptop batteries. Turns out they are a bit like the Harbor Freight of the electronics world 🙂 I have a whole bunch of their ‘free’ SD cards and USB drives.

        They have really upped their game in the last few years though. Ours has a bunch of ‘maker’ stuff in stock, including dozens of 3d printers, a whole couple of aisles of tools and kits, and even maker focused email newsletters.

        They still have the zit faced greasy sales guys from Fry’s trying to earn a commission on selling monitors and PCs. It would be nice to see the end of that, and it would be nice if they carried more radio stuff.

        Still, they are a great local resource.
        n

    2. Ha! A fellow fan!

      I heard recently that older content on streaming services is being edited to reflect modern wokism. Removing cigarettes, and in some cases entire episodes. The memory hole is real. The local computer shop charged my dad $50 every time he showed up after breaking his computer, even though it was always a quick fix.

      Hope your New Year goes great, Nick!

  11. Penultimate Day is a construct of the white male patriarchy.
    Sailfawns (cellphones) fall under property is theft, comrade.
    All will be redistributed with CPUSA agitprop back doors for the latest update on how to act in the third rate faculty lounge 1960’s LARP not so Great Leap Forward egalitarian workers utopia.
    Italian food reinforces negative stereotypes of greasy Guido goodfellas.
    Honk, honk!

  12. When best buy kicked the founder out it went to shit in a heartbeat.

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