Thanks to everyone who donated to the Penrickton Center — the event was a hit, even with masses of hideous facial hair like this beauty floating around.

And if you want to help me out in my efforts by donating to the Penrickton Center for Blind Children, here’s how:

1. Go to http://rosstache.wordpress.com/
2. Click “Donate”
3. Make your donation through PayPal. If you don’t have a PayPay account, click “Continue” under “Don’t Have a Paypal Account?” to donate by credit card. Just before you donate, there is an option to answer “Which Rosstacher are you donating for”. Indicate my name there. Big or small, all donations are helpful.

Time to 1982 it up.

Yo all.

It’s been a mostly post-free summer for this website, but life is good right now, so I’ve been living it instead of blogging it.

It’s just a few short weeks now until I quit my job, go on a quick vacation and then move up to Ann Arbor for b-school. While going to Michigan is bound to be fun and rewarding, at the moment it feels sad as an indicator that the summer situation will come to an end. A quick list of just what will be ending:

• I work from home in Chicago, giving me an extra two hours of the day that would have otherwise been spent commuting. Sure, I miss the social interaction of the office and the chance to catch up on my train-bound reading, but dropping my daily commute down to the 22 seconds it takes to roll out of bed and walk down to my computer is a phat tradeoff. Admittedly it has had some deleterious effects on personal grooming, but funk doesn’t travel through phone lines.
• The Wife is busy studying for the bar, but the plus side of that is that she doesn’t have classes (except recently ended half-day BarBri lectures) so we get all day to be the obnoxious married couple that enjoys each other’s company. And I do usually shower at her prompting. Word.
• I have a pile of friends living here the likes of which I haven’t had since being in New York. Oddly enough, several of those friends have moved here too. Flip-cup and late-night taco stands just weren’t the same without the homies.
• Our condo is totally sweet-ass. That’s really the only compound adjective to describe it.
• Chicago. Summer. It’s the bomb. This summer has featured July 4th fireworks from the 70th floor of the Sears Tower, running along the lake, getting my lift on again, the discovery of my all-time favorite barbershop, relatively cool weather, plenty of socializing, and madd Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago dogs.

Ann Arbor right now represents the following: not getting paid to work in my pajamas, a wife living 250 miles away, confusion over football loyalties, and a paucity of Italian beef. That’s overly harsh and I really do think it’s going to be lots of fun, plus I hear Zingerman’s sandwiches are quite tasty, but UMich won’t be fun the same way that this summer has been.

They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I’m well aware that I have a shitload and I sure as hell am enjoying it. Here’s hoping the rest of you peeps are enjoying yours as well.

I was thinking the other day about just how much money these things have saved me. I started cutting my own hair about sophomore year of college and haven’t gone to a barber since. (Which is sometimes sad, because old-school barbershops are the phattest thing in grooming.) I’ve been through two pairs at $20 apiece since then, so that’s a total hair expenditure of $40.

If I cut my hair once a month, which is actually less often than I do it now, then that’s roughly $18 per month for your standard haircut. That seems like a total ripoff, so it’s good that I’m paying the high cost of zero. It’s been eight years and two months (!) since I started my sophomore year of college, so that works out to 98 months. If you multiply that by $18, you get $1,764. Subtract $40 and you still have $1,724. Oh snap.

So each set of clippers is a net positive worth of $862. What about if I assume I cut my hair every two weeks, which is a lot more realistic? At 26 times per year over eight years, plus four more for two months, then I’ve got a net of $3,776—$1,888 per clipper set.

This 2006 unkempt version of me, with glasses and a buzz cut, agrees wholeheartedly that that is amazing.