We visited an India-Pakistan store nearby, for the first time. Scarily old products (best before 2008) on shelves, but netted what I was looking for: amla hair oil. Strengthens the hair, gives it shine, and purportedly hides grey. Good source of Vitamin C as it is from gooseberry. Strangely they had no ground cumin in bulk.

This week neither my spouse nor I went out for coffee. Including drip. This is a first. I attribute it to his day off yesterday and my bout of cystitis.

Our interest from CDs and accounts was calculated and added. Not much, but more than what we would have budgeted for coffee this week.

Some Comcast guy offered my spouse some upgrade, but was wretched and rude about it. He claimed that for $9 extra a month the speed would double before verifying what speed we had, and we'd have access to 80 television channels (no interest to us). Comcast doesn't offer any individualized plan of optimal benefit for the consumer. I put my hand on spouse's shoulder and said "Comcast is a small company. There's only so much it can do." The sales guy riposted, "Everything should be free, huh?" Which makes no sense. I wasn't asking for free stuff and didn't complain about our current bill.

It's rare that anyone comes to us with "hey we have a way to save you money" that actually results in a lower monthly cost and better quality. BECU gets five star reviews from me because they did not balk at switching our mortgage plan from 15-year plus application fee to 12-year with no application fee once the latter mortgage product had rolled out. They didn't say "Everything should be free, huh?"