This Morning I found $2200 in Central Park.

Is it true that you can write a check on just about anything? My wife got thes kind with little kittens on them and it pisses me off when I go to a hardware store and buy something manly and pay with these goddamm kitten checks. So, I asked for some John Deere tractor checks. Bitch

Damn, Joe! I'll have to take up running. Next time it could be cash.

Joe, I was just thinking about you today. I was thinking of coming to visit you at the hardware store, but I forget where it is. What street are you on again?

Kicky (I went to the Shake Shack and the line was ridiculous) can

My husband and I were order business checks and we decided to go with the basic blue. My husband then noticed the Super Heroes motif,and more than half seriously says "I wish we could get these." So I'm now about to pay a trucking company with a Green Hornet check. (I'm not a bitch, usually).

Sh¡t! Why couldn't that person loose it four or five weeks later when I am there? (And that certainly is a reason to make checks here popular again!)

Farmer: that explains the hilarious story I heard the other day at the monthly meeting of Tri-State Surly Hardware Store Clerks Club. We swap tales of customers asking for a four-foot yardstick or a small gallon of paint. (My personal favorite is the guy who couldn't understand why we wouldn't or couldn't sell him a magnet to pick up brass screws.) The Surly Hardware Store member was going on and on about the big hairy guy with the little pussycats on his checks. I won't relate everything he said but there were some references to 'balls the size of 00 buckshot'. Just thought you'd like to know.
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I did find cash on a recent run and I have a question.

Okay, I am on my way to the Brooklyn Half Marathon. It's my sixtieth birthday and I am a little wound up and worried that I haven't gotten in enough training and I am on the subway and it is running slow and I am lecturing myself to calm down and just let everything be as I am going through my bag trying to find something to clean my glasses when I feel a coin at the bottom of the bag. I often throw change into my bag, sometimes there is enough to snag a Gatorade at one of park stands. I pull out the coin and it's a wheat penny. Now, as you know, I am not a believer in things extra or super natural, but when I turned the penny over and saw the date 1947 I felt an immediate rush followed by a supreme feeling of calmness that lasted throughout my whole day.

My question is: what the hell was that?

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It's very easy to get a burger at the SHAKE SHACK
1) Get there early. A quarter past seven is usually early enough to beat half of the noon rush.
2) Do not talk to or make eye contact with anyone behind you on the line. They will probably tell you they need a double burger extra sauce for their child who is dying in a nearby hospital. Kiss off!!
3) Use books on tape to pass the time. I listened to McCullough's John Adams twice last week, it's not very good but it filled the time.
4) Try to talk to the people in front of you about your dying father in the nearby hospital whose last wish is for a Shackburger and a Chocolate Shake. (I sometimes crush a bit of onion near my left eye. The tears look genuine.)
5)If you are with someone get them to talk about that really great OTHER restaurant just around the corner from Madison Park. Make up stuff about how it's really the best burger in the city and that you just come here so that you can stand in the rain, but that that OTHER place is really the really best. Really. Give people directions to the other place. Tell them the sign is very small.
6) As you get close to the window, maybe with about fifty people between you and yum-yum-yum, go over your ordering speech in your head and have your money ready. The less time you spend hemming and hawing over your order the faster you will be enjoying. (If your companion hesitates for a moment during the order process, pay for yours and walk away.)

Or you can do what I do: Go to the kitchen door with the big pack of scraper blades the manager ordered from your store on 23rd Street.

Trade them for the big bag of doubles-extra sauce with the two Shack Attack Shakes.

Joe(the check was made out to a Richard Cheney)Nation

Yeah, and I finally got my UK lotto check in the mail yesterday while I was out of the country. That's what my wife told me. I'm really curious to see the amount after I sent them all the information they asked for.

I found a credit card on the floor few weeks back, if I was more crafty I could have been a rich lady!!

yes. A sin-filled, guilt-ridden, haunted by visions of hell, rich lady.



Joe(like them all)Nation

You carry a bag?

Early birds, unlucky worms.

This is New York where everyday resembles a camping trip.

You have to take with you everything that you will need either on your commute or at wherever you are going. We are the Isle of Schleppers. Everyone carries something in the city, a bag, a backpack, a fanny pack, a shopping bag or two, or three, a cloth gunny or plain unhandled paper, a brief or attache case - both of which are usually filled with the same stuff as everyone else's bags, you never see anyone without a bag. If you do, be assured that they on their way to pick up a bag.

I have a dun colored fanny pack that I started out using on my training runs to carry a crushed up windbreaker, my wallet, my keys, my camera, my cellphone and my Palm. There's no place in my running shorts for all that. At the ends of most of my runs there is a time when I have to stand around soaked with sweat waiting for a train and I get cold, hence the need for the windbreaker. In deep winter it becomes a sweatshirt and an extra dry shirt. The fanny pack gets huge. The only things I've managed to eliminate from that list are the camera and the phone, both of which are now combined into my TreoPalm.

Except when actually in a race, when the bag is placed into an area called 'baggage' and watched by volunteers, I still do all my runs with it. So that is about five days out of seven, sometimes six.

I've been tempted some mornings to weigh it, after I've shoved in a sandwich and a banana, a New Yorker to read on the train and a bottle of Rain Gatorade, my new favorite, but I don't dare.

I look at it this way, I used to run with fifty more pounds of me to carry, so what's the difference of a ten pound bag?

Joe(The other day I shoved in a 1lb bag of doggie treats to give out at the store.)Nation

The totem for our era is the turtle.

or the kangaroo

or the pelican

All the great carriers, luggers, haulers......

the champion of nature is the tumblebug


although the common ant seems to get better press coverage.

Joe(Superman, able to leap tall buildings, but can he schlep home a week's worth of groceries???)Nation

I see an invention here. We make a shopping cart that is a direct market ripoff from the homeless, you put bigger ball bearing wheels (so you can make newer versions that make older ones obsolete. Also a trimmer basket and in colors

This is great

Call Inventions Inc.

It can't cost more than $29.99. and it can't weigh more than four pounds.

Colors?? what you mean like pastels? No! Red White Blue Black. That's it.


Joe(Mostly just black)Nation

Today is your birthday, Joe?

Happy Natal Day, honey.

Why is it that I never find anything? Is it because I'm a loser?

No, today is hamburger's birthday.

You have to spend a lot of time looking down to find anything.

Joe(you keep looking up)Nation

Hamburger's been flipped so many times, we lost count of this b'days.