By no longer buying Magic cards on a tri-monthly basis I’ve had a little extra cash to direct towards other things.  I wanted to get a replacement 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for a while as my current one just wasn’t cutting it and about a month ago I started looking for a replacement.  The current Canon lens of that type has very powerful image stabilization but is about $2400 so I was happy to find a used version of the previous generation for $1200.  Attempting to maintain my frugality, I didn’t jump on this immediately thinking it may drop further only to see both copies that were available through lensrentals.com disappear a few days later.  I then saw borrowlenses.com had one for about $1400 and I held off thinking it may drop to what lensrentals.com had been offering.  It too was gone shortly thereafter and eBay was my next source with the lens available at about $1700, $500 above what I had first seen it at.

At this point, I found copies of the newest 70-200 for about $2050 used and bought one at a mere $850 above my initial intended price.  I’ve used the surplus cash I had from Magic…. for all of 2011, and my tax return, and my birthday money.  Buy high, sell low.

I received my tax refund/payback of interest-free loan to the government direct deposited this morning and within seconds hit “Checkout” on the Amazon shopping cart that held my new camera and lenses.  I chose “free shipping” and “box so my items get here faster” as even individually each item qualified for free shipping.

I checked the order page and saw that I could upgrade the shipping and for a mere $30, did so and sat satisfied knowing I’d get the camera in time for…nothing.  So I changed it back to FREE! and smiled knowing that by just waiting a few more days, I’d have enough extra money for a day of ribs.  But maybe I could split the difference with two day for a mere $10 and still have it in time for…. nothing.  Switched to two-day and then thought of that shipping as the equivalent of a lunch as a discount Chinese food buffet and after some more waffling I changed it back to FREE! and smirked at my bout of financial weakness.

The items shipped and I started compulsively tracking the packages and noticed something, the boxes with the lenses and the boxes with the camera were diverging.  During my waffling, the box with the lenses shipped as 2nd day air while the camera itself didn’t ship until after I went back to FREE! ground shipping.  Looks like I’m going to have a tea party with my lenses on my birthday as that’s about all I’ll be able do.