Shaving soap and motor oil

Now I certainly don't mind a bargain, and the Internet can be a wonderful thing. I just recently found via the web two items I struggle to find in brick and mortar stores: shaving soap and wrap around coffee filters. I discovered very good prices and free shipping for reasonably large quantities of each. The deals were so good that I almost doubled them. But it occurred to me that it gets a bit silly to plan too far into the future on items which will surely be available later and under similar deals. Put simply, I don't need to buy five years ahead on shaving soap.

Me Pops had a friend, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who changed the oil in both his and his wife's (I'll call her Mrs. Cloyce just to give her a name) cars on his own. No issue there of course. It's his right. So he was constantly on the lookout for good oil prices. No issue there either. It makes good sense. Only he went, I believe anyways, more than a bit overboard on that last point.

He reached the point where he had accumulated 48 cases of motor oil, stacked all around his basement. That's 24 quarts per case for, let me get my calculator out...1,152 quarts of oil. And almost two dozen filters, twelve each for each one of their cars. Especially considering he and Mrs. Cloyce were retired and only drove around town (they flew to major destinations) Cloyce had far more motor oil than he would ever need. By his own admittance he only had to change the oil once or twice a year per car. Yet when he stumbled upon a sale, he'd buy another case. Or two.

That's going just a little beyond the call of duty I think. But hey, his money, right?

The mug brush

I saw it on a shelf in a closet as we went through the house we had just bought. It was a boar's hair shaving brush with a orange brown handle and hair which had a black stripe near the tips. At that very moment I knew we'd be good friends. But I closed the door and left it to sit that day.
A few years later I was in a drug store and stumbled upon some cakes of shaving soap. I remembered that mug brush, bought two of those soaps, and came home. My wife gave me a coffee cup with a broken handle, of which the cakes fit into perfectly. From that day on I was fully old school. I have shaved with a mug and brush since.
I think I get a closer shave that way. My face feels better too. Wally, my old barber, said it was because of the oils in the shaving soap. I believe him; that's how he shaved customers. I'm at the point now that shaving with cream makes me feel like I just had a pie smacked onto my face. Even when I travel I just use soap for shaving.
We had a great relationship, that brush and I. Then the hairs popped out of the handle one day last week. I was beside myself wondering what to do. I didn't want to buy another brush: we had become too close, me and the old one. But fortunately the hairs came our in one big clump (I suppose I should have expected that) and my wife had some waterproof glue which she used to re-attach the bristles to the handle.
Now all is well. I still have my old friend, and I still have the best kind of close shaves.