Progress Report: The Failure to Date of the $15.23 Date

So much for sticking to a budget. As I think you all know, last week I put some comics up for sale with the plan of killing two birds by cleaning out a little room and then using the proceeds to take Monique out for a date. Sales were a bit slow, but I did manage to raise a whopping $15.23 for the date.

And I did have a genuinely good plan for a $15.23 date, the Friday Night Live! series at the Detroit Institute of Arts. We're members, so we can get in free to that. I reckoned we'd do a bit of snacking at the cafeteria, enjoy some music, and check out a bit of art. I was pretty sure we could bring that evening in under $15.23. (The accounting minded among you may note that I'm not including a prorated portion of our annual DIA membership, but I figured it as a "sunk cost" that should be exempted from the return-on-investment of a Friday night date.)

I also had a great backup plan. Admission for classic movies at the Redford Theater is just $4.00 apiece. And although I don't recall the exact cost of popcorn and soda there, but it's correspondingly cheap, less than $5. So I figured that even with popcorn, soda, and a couple of 50-50 tickets we could bring in an evening at the Redford for less than $15.23 with a dollar or two to spare. Better yet, this week they had the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera" which would be a fun movie to watch there.

Alas, it was not to be.

Thanks to the gallant efforts of "The Real Rookie" Rob Jameson, this was also the week that a new set of flaming bowling shirts arrived for the DOGS. (For those who don't know, the Detroit Old Guys Select is the old boys rugby squad for the Detroit RFC.) Since several of the DOGS are headed down to Georgia next weekend to play in Savannah's St. Patrick's Day tournament, we needed to distribute them quickly, so as to show sufficient Savannah St. Paddy's sartorial splendor.

Because this Friday was also the women's club's night to volunteer for the Friday Night Fish Fry at the Commonwealth Club, and since the Commonwealth Club makes the best fish & chips in Detroit, we declared Friday night to be Flaming Bowling Shirt Distribution Night at the Commonwealth Club. A good time was had by all:

(Yes, Monique was there, too. She was the one who took this picture, since she was sporting a pretty sweater instead of a flaming bowling shirt.)

However, fish & chips at the Commonwealth Club runs $8 a plate. A beer and a soda ran another $5.25 plus tip, running the cost of the best fish & chips in Michigan plus beverages to $23. Worse yet, in a desperate move of sheer profligacy, we stopped at the local video store and rented District Nine afterwards, which ran the cost of our Friday evening out to a budget-busting $26.50, a whopping $11.27 over the target.

I suppose there was a chance we might've recovered on Saturday night, but we decided to go out to see Up in the Air at the eMagine theater in Novi. We ate at home and skipped the soda and popcorn, but two first-run movie admissions still ran us $19.00, overrunning the budget by $4.77.

So, the bright side is that Monique and I managed to go out twice this weekend and have a really good time for less than fifty bucks total, an average cost of just $22.75 per date. The bad thing is that means that I overspent the new date fund by about thirty bucks. Obviously, my free-spending ways need to be reigned in, but in the meantime I need to atone for my wasteful fiscal sins. How?

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