8/23/10

This photograph may or may not be relevant to your interests.  It will, however, be relevant to this blog post at some point.

Today was Monday.  This means that it was my day off.  After getting to bed in the early hours of this morning, I intended to waste most of my day sleeping.  It didn't work out that way.  For some unknown reason I was wide awake at 11am.  Bummer.

After I bummed around for a few hours, I decided to make some productive use of my afternoon.  I recently had heard some radio ads for a place in Southfield that buys gold.  With gold at or near its all time high, I was curious to see if I could make a few bucks.  I'll never be mistaken for a precious metals magnate but I did have a few things lying around.  One was my class ring from Lincoln Park High School - Class of '94.  Another was my wedding ring - Class of '97.  One more was my Con-way Truckload service award - Class of '09.  Since I can think of no reason that I'll ever have a use for any of them, I packed up the three rings and headed out.  I really couldn't tell you the official name of the place, but their website is maxyourgold.com.  (For the record - I get no remuneration from what I'm saying here.  Feel free to click a Google ad on the side of the page if you want to throw a few cents in my direction, but this is a straightforward report.)

The chick behind the counter informed me that class rings derive quite a bit of their weight from the stone.  She then asked if it would be okay to remove the stone from mine.  "Do what you gotta do," I replied.  She put some acid on each ring, then proceeded to crush the stone in my Class of '94 ring with a pair of pliers.  Hardcore.  For some reason though, there was no crushing of the pretty blue stone in my Con-way ring.  Interesting.

After a few minutes I got some news.  "I don't know what this ring is.  Seems to be some sort of copper alloy, but it's definitely not gold."  Go ahead and take a guess at which ring she was holding.  I stifled a hearty laugh at this point in time.  It had the little '10K' stamp and everything.  "Con..."  Heh.  They gave me a fake.  Awesome.

It turned out that my terribly cheap wedding ring had 5 grams of 14 karat gold.  My ex-wife and I were pretty broke when we got married, in case you haven't figured out the math yet.  That ring, I was told, was worth a little over a hundred bucks.  Next on the list was my high school class ring.  It contained 16 grams of 10 karat gold.  Just over two hundred bucks for that one.  I went into this little exercise hoping to get $200 for the three rings.  I wound up with $315.08 for the two that were actually gold.  Works for me.  (The invoice that I received showed that I was getting roughly half the spot price of my gold, but it's not like I had any means of melting it down myself and putting it on the world market, right?)

Feeling pretty good about my voyage thus far, I stopped for lunch at a local burger joint.  I had seen a recent news report saying that Five Guys had the best fast-food burgers in the country.  There was a Five Guys location right by the gold place in Southfield so I couldn't resist my curiosity.  For whatever it's worth I thought the food was pretty solid.  I eat my burgers plain, meaning that I don't tend to buy into a lot of the hype surrounding these places.  It seems to me that people get a little too caught up in the toppings.  That being said, my plain burger today was plenty tasty and the fries were excellent.  They were like a more perfectly manicured version of the hand-cut fries that Mom used to make.  One more good thing about today's visit to Southfield.

The next stop on my agenda was a friend's house in Lincoln Park.  As I swung around to catch M-10 toward the Southfield Freeway, I spotted a little place along the side of the road - JR Cigars.  I enjoy an occasional Nat Sherman cigariilo and I used to stop at one of the JR outlets in North Carolina when I was a real trucker, so curiosity got the best of me today.  I pulled into the lot and took a look.  Five tins (100 cigarillos) for $45.  I'll take it.  I haven't seen the price so low since ole Ted Kennedy pushed through a tax hike to fund children's health insurance... for 25 year olds.  This trip to Southfield was turning out to be a pretty good one indeed.

After spending some time with my friends in the LP, I had to make a decision.  Either I would head out to the gym or I would take the night off and find somewhere to watch the ballgame instead.  The ballgame won that battle.  I had just wrapped up my last workout this morning, so waiting until tomorrow to blast my chest wasn't going to hurt anything.  And the Tigers put a whooping on Kansas City just for good measure.

I have an 11:15am pull for tomorrow, so I'll have to get up a little earlier than usual.  Flint, Midland, and Mount Pleasant - sounds like a long one.