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Archive for December, 2013

Pre-Christmas treasure finds for $0

December 27th, 2013 at 09:50 pm

For my Christmas visit with the GF we stopped at a local Goodwill outlet just to pass a little time. In the past we have found some interesting things, but this time... really nice stuff for real cheap.

I ended up with up some nice Corelle dishes, some hobby items for me (2 toy trains - pretty much complete), some electronic cabling (USB cabling and some cables for the LCD TV I inherited). While I waited for her to finish, I searched the books and got a few I thought might be sellable.

Instead of waiting until I got back home I quickly listed two of them online that night (half.com). Next morning I got up and checked my email, and here one book already sold for more than I paid for everything from the thrift store.

Dang I love it when I can get something I like (my hobbies), and have it all paid for. If only everything in life worked that well.

Getting paid to be entertained for the evening - Priceless

December 2nd, 2013 at 03:34 am

After dropping off my son at the airport Black Friday morning, and waiting 3 hours for my girl friend to pick me up (long story, but not her fault), we went to Baltimore for a museum visit. That was a great time (thanks to my GF!), on the way back she describes to me her time at the mall trying to buy the latest phones for her kids for Christmas. But one item caught my attention, the mall has a casino right next to it. Now I never to go a casino. That is a wonderful way to lose money.

She tells me that the employee where she bought the phones said that there was an offer where you could take your receipts to the casino and get "free money" to play the slots. Intrigued, I asked if she was interested in going there to find out more about it, since it would be a long time before we came back that way. On a whim, we decide to try it. Oh, what an adventure.

The mall parking was insane, but the casino had a 7 level parking garage. After about 15 minutes in mall traffic we were parked on the top level. Once we found our way to the casino entrance, we got in and asked where to go for the offer. After she signed up, we got $50(!) in slot play money.

This was new to us. Apparently we got something like a credit card that we could slip into a slot machine. Well this place had 100's, if not over a thousand, slot machines. After wandering around dazed at the lights and noise, we sat down at a slot machine and spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how to use it (yep, we were clueless at first). Finally figuring it out, we made a few plays and "won" some money, maybe $2 worth. However the machine would just add your winnings to your balance on the machine. This was confusing to us, and at this point we didn't know what to do, so we decided to go to another machine. We found that the machine would return the un-played free slot money to your card, but not your winnings. That money you had to "cash out". Cashing out would give you a winnings voucher.

I quickly realized what the machines were setup to do. By not showing your winnings total, most people would keep playing until all the money was spent, including your winnings. The trick was to play only as much as you pulled off of your card onto the machine, but no more. At that point you should do a "cash out" to get the winnings, and roll any un-played free slot money back onto the card and go to the next machine.

We then went from machine to machine, playing $5 worth of spins at each machine, cashing out, then moving on. At the end of our free slot money we stopped and went to the cashier to get our winnings. We ended up with just over $25. So we got about 2 hours of "adventure" and ended up with $25 for the effort. Priceless Big Grin