For a little over a week now I’ve been completely addicted to Roswell. It’s an old TV show from 1999 about aliens. Basically a teen soap opera with lots of aliens and making out. I remember seeing commercials for it on TV, back when it came out but never got around to watching it even though when I was married our TV was on nonstop.

Last week I was browsing through the television selections on hulu.com for something random to watch while I did some other things and I picked Roswell. And I’ve done nothing productive since then. It’s a ridiculous show, with nonstop love scenes that make me wanna puke and the gayest music ever, but it’s still great. In just a week I’ve watched 2 1/2 seasons of their 45 minute episodes. Only the first season was on Hulu so I downloaded the rest on bittorrent. Only 8 episodes to go and I’m free! Free to resume my life and quit staring at my laptop all day.

In non-Roswell news, Emily had a birthday. I got her a D&D starter kit, even though I know nothing about D&D. The kids and I and two of their friends went to see 17 Again at the theater, which I expected to not enjoy at all but it was actually not so bad. Today we had dinner at Denny’s and then stopped by Goodwill for some speakers. This evening I ran speaker wires to the new speakers for my stereo. Doesn’t that sound like an 80’s thing to do? Who has a stereo anymore? I use an old stereo that I got from Goodwill for the sound on my computer. While stripping various wires tonight, I remembered how much I got yelled at as a kid for using my mom’s scissors as wire strippers and butter knives from the kitchen as screwdrivers. And I think it was my babysitter that used to complain at me for using my teeth to strip wires. (Which is how I discovered that phone wires have enough current in them to shock you.) Now that I’m an adult I get to do all that stuff guilt-free.

Hrmm, more things happened but as usual I’m old and can’t remember much. Molly came by to pick up all my boxes because she’s moving to D.C. I’ve been texting the hell out of Jessica this weekend, and she is currently watching the pilot episode of Roswell because I ranted to her about it, so I might have a new recruit for that show. Tomorrow night is The Phone Show, which I’m being ordered to clean up my act on. (No more cursing.) I think that’s it. Time to go watch the rest of episode #10 in season #3 before I go to sleep.

Biked about 15 miles today, looking for Geocaches. Had to quit when the battery on my cell phone died. Took a few pictures.

Closing in on a cache.

A microcache, hanging from a tree.

I think I’m going to bye this truck.

Hey look, a 38-year-old car for just $4,000!

A ripped up old chair with an arm missing for FREE!

Went Geocaching yesterday too. We did 8 or 9 of them during a hike. Had Mexican food and saw Knowing, which was a really bizarre movie.

A couple weekends ago I was at a flea market in Eugene and happened across a metal Nova emblem that goes on the back of an old Chevy Nova for $3.00. I thought, “Gee, this would look awesome if I put it on the back of my 2000 Ford Focus! It would cause at least a few instances of WTF from passing motorists who happened to notice it.” So I bought it. And tonight I finally scraped the plastic Focus lettering off the back of my car, drilled a couple of holes and hammered it permanently into the hatchback.

You can still see traces of the word Focus under it, but I plan to blast those away the next time I end up at the car wash. This is how I spend my Friday nights.

This week I’m really loving Silly Really by Per Gessle and We Made You by Eminem. I know I’ll get sick of the Eminem song eventually, as I do with most of his hits. But for now it’s hilarious.

Yesterday the kids and I went to Burger King, just to use their free wifi. Emily bought herself the new DS and wanted to try out the online features, but the thing stupidly doesn’t connect to WPA-protected routers. Only WEP. How stupid is that? Get with it, Nintendo! Guess I have to buy one of those stupid USB wifi things that Nintendo makes. Anyone know if that just opens up a WEP backdoor to my network? So if I’m going to use it I may as well just be using WEP on my existing router?

As we’re leaving I notice a cell phone sitting on the seat of an empty booth. A Motorola Razr which belonged to one of the teenage girls who’d been sitting there earlier. She was the loud, obnoxious girl who was yelling across the restaurant at the bus full of soccer players. The screen was caked with her makeup. That’s when you know you’re wearing too much makeup, when you can barely make out the text on the screen because it’s covered in makeup.

Anyway, I pick it up and bring it home with us. I’ve found cell phones before and we’ve used them for all sorts of nefarious purposes, but I decided that I didn’t really want to do anything with this one. If The Spessas were here, sure. But they weren’t, so today I looked through the phone’s address book and called her dad to tell him I had the phone.

He was really happy to hear that it’d been found and said he’d like to come over right away. He even said he’d give me a reward for it, but I told him that was okay. He showed up about 30 minutes later to retrieve the phone and tried to give me $10, but I told him he should tell his daughter to repay the good deed to someone else instead. He laughed and said he would.

Oh yeah, I changed the phone’s background wallpaper to one of the girl’s many slutty self-portraits she had stored on it. Hope her dad loved see that when he turned it on. Even when I do nice things, I’m a huge jerk.

The Gamma Dose Rate Meter was probably the coolest thing I saw at the Picc-A-Dilly flea market on Sunday. Me, Kate, Eric and a few other people drove there and spent a few hours. It’s been close to a year since I visited that place. I didn’t buy it, though. I did buy a couple books, some padlocks to pick and a 9-LED flashlight for just $3.00. Went on some hikes too, one on Saturday morning and another on Sunday evening.

Last night me and linear did epiosde #4 of The Phone Show. If anyone reading this wants to listen to the archives, visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow/. I’m enjoying doing it. I thought it would be kind of a drag, having to come up with an hour’s worth of show every week, but we’re not even preparing for it. We just take phone calls for most of the hour and hope for the best. So thanks a lot for the show, Party 934!

Last month while looking through all my old envelopes to discover my old addresses, I also came across this handwritten chart, written on the back of my work schedule from Union Station Cine, showing how much money I could make doing quarter roll scams:

This is something I wrote about on my Travels page, but never went into too much detail on. But here’s how it went… In 1992 I discovered that I could pass off rolls of pennies as rolls of quarters to convenience store clerks and other businesses. I did this by taking a roll of pennies and removing 4 of the pennies, then wrapping a couple strips of construction paper around the roll. Stick the finished product into an ordinary paper quarter roll and you’ve got yourself a roll of quarters worth just 46 cents.

In 1992 I’d passed a few of these around Alton and it seemed to work perfectly every time. So Chris Tomkinson and I decide that we’ll spend an entire day, driving from Alton to Paducah, Kentucky, passing out quarter rolls to as many businesses as possible. And by we, I mean me. Chris wasn’t dumb enough to pass the quarters, but I still wanted to split the profits with him if he came along with me.

We had a great time during the trip and the fake quarter rolls paid for our gas and excessive amounts of food and drink all the way there. We also had fun exploring some of Paducah. I don’t know why Chris picked Paducah of all places, but it was a good destination and we got to visit Metropolis, Illinois, the home of Superman! (Or so they claim.)

What I would do is buy something for under $1.00 (usually) and then say, “Could you use any quarters? I happen to have this roll here.” and they would almost always accept it. Then I’d get my $9.00 in change and quickly leave. For the most part, passing the rolls of quarters went smoothly, but I did have occasional close calls. Like one lady who really needed the quarters for her register and started banging them on the edge of the counter to break them, only they wouldn’t break because of the extra layers of paper. I quickly made my way out the door and ran to the car.

Another time the guy opened the roll before giving me my change and saw that there were pennies inside. I had to pretend that I was the one who got scammed by some other store. “The clerk at 7-Eleven had to give me this yesterday because they were out of large bills!” I can’t remember if he seemed to believe me, but at least he didn’t jump over the counter and tackle me for it.

And then there’s the lady who discovered the fakes as I was talking to her and backing out the door. She sees the pennies and goes, “Hey!” I quickly exit and run to my car. Luckily she had to walk around the long counter before she could make it out the door. I was in my car and starting it when she burst out of the front doors and towards my car. I backed out of my place and just kept backing up out of the parking lot and down the street. This particular incident actually happened before Paducah, in East Alton right across the street from the police station.

In between hitting stores, Chris put together the fake rolls of quarters while I drove. I had a metal file box filled with all the necessary supplies for making fakes. I guess we weren’t too worried about fingerprints because I don’t remember us taking any precautions against that. Guess it’d be hard to lift prints from construction paper, though.

Our last close call was very late at night as we were making our way home. On some Illinois highway, cops were stopping all cars and checking for drunks. Before we got up to the checkpoint we were pretty sure that it was some kind of state-wide manhunt for quarter roll scammers. They check my drivers license and talked to us for a few seconds to make sure we weren’t drinking. They shined their light all over the inside of my car. The metal box full of counterfeiting supplies was on the floor in the back.

The problem came when I couldn’t find my insurance card. I looked everywhere for it and couldn’t find it. Not in the glovebox or the visor. Checked all over the floor. Nowhere. The cop kept leaving and coming back to see if I’d found it. And each time he kept shining his light around my car. He finally had us pull to the side of the road to get out of the way of traffic. Chris was freaking out, sure that they would eventually search the car and find our box. After what seemed like forever, I finally found my insurance card amongst all the trash on my floor and we were allowed to leave. It was a stressful search though.

Our final profits for the day were pretty pitiful. Nowhere near the possible $9,500 that I fantasied we could take in. We didn’t keep track of the money during the trip, but we just spent a lot of it on food, gas and other junk and didn’t have much left by the time we got home. But it was still a fun and completely free trip. After our scamming roadtrip, I gave up on the idea of quarter roll scamming being profitable and never tried it again, mostly because it seemed just too risky. Took me a few more years, though, to give up my dream of scamming for a living.

Our quarter roll scamming did make the police log in the Alton Telegraph. I remember they claimed we’d hit places that we didn’t actually hit, such as the Wood River Donut Shop. So either the police were trying to anger us into calling them and telling them how wrong they were, or there was a copycat criminal out there.