Minimally Exceptional

Monday was the last day of our vacation. Technically we came back in town on sunday, but we took monday off to recover and run some errands.

We took my car to the shop to have the damage from the accident with the 18 wheeler repaired, picked up the rental car, went to the bank, dealt with the termite guy, and dealt with the geeksquad. Finally we headed to south county mall to do a little shopping.

As we turned onto Lindbergh, I couldn’t believe my eyes: a rather large fellow was cruising down Lindbergh in his motorized wheelchair.

I would have taken a picture, but there was too much traffic on the road.

That’s right. There was too much traffic on the road for me to take a picture, but apparently not enough traffic to deter a guy in a motorized wheelchair from taking it out onto Lindbergh.

I love STL.

At the risk of being unreasonable: both Chase and Citigroup can kiss my big ass.

Last week I received a notice that Chase was increasing the APR on my credit card. It is changing from a 7.99% fixed rate to a 14.59% variable rate. Total bullshit and really irritating, as I have been nothing but the perfect customer. Also not that big of a deal as my balance on that card is only about thirty bucks right now. Easy enough – pay it off and stop using it.

Today I got basically the same change in terms from citicards. My 8.99% (which is currently 3.99% on a promotion) is going to become a minimum of 14.99%.

That’s not going to fly. I have a pretty big balance of wedding bills on that card, and I feel like with my credit history they can do better than that.

Incidentally, Laura and I both have preapproved applications from Commerce bank that came last week. 0% for a year, which then becomes prime plus 3.99%, minimum of 9.99%.

I called citi to try and leverage the commerce application. I politely and calmly explained to the gal on the phone that the interest rate they were giving me was not reasonable, and told her about the commerce cards. I also told her that I would really rather keep doing business with citi, but that I would need them to at least try and match the 9.99% or they were going to lose my business when I transfer my balances to commerce.

She pretty much told me that they would get over it.

Is this what it boils down to? Billions of taxpayer dollars to keep the place running, and they turn around and give it to their good customers in the shorts?

Criminals.

Why am I so stupidly addicted to Shirt.woot? I mean, I love the shirt.woots overall (there are probably 6 or 7 that I bought and wear regularly), but the random shirt.woot gets me every time. In all fairness, I guess I am addicted to woot and their super cheap SD/Micro SD memory cards, because for some reason I buy 3 of them whenever they’re up (and Laura yells at me every time).

I guess it’s better than being addicted to cocaine or meth, but I just can’t figure out why I am a sucker for $7.00 mystery shirts. I have picked up the random shirt.woot three times now (with a fourth on the way), and ordered the maximum of 3 shirts each time. So that ‘s a grand total of 12 random shirts. In terms of the shirts themselves, I’m batting about .500 pending this week’s order. I have had one really great set of 3, one lame set of 3, and one set with two good ones and a lame one.

I’ll have to take a look at the shirt.woots that I have so far and post some of the ones that I really like.

What is it about a random shirt that hooks me in every time? Is it the uncertainty of not knowing what you’re going to get or how great/terrible they’re going to be? Is it the high hopes of getting a neat shirt that you wanted but missed the first time around? Am I just that much of a total dork?

…

Well, I guess I answered my own question there, didn’t I.

Obviously, I get an F+ on my daily updates. Did great for a week, was suddenly busy as hell. Our audit started at work, I worked some crazy hours, and had tons of stuff happening on the weekends. Now, here I am.

On one of those weekends, we went to the mardi gras pet parade with the two dogs and entered Dudley in the weenie dog races.

Our weenie is a lot of things. He’s cute, slutty, gets into trouble… But he is no racer. Our weenie has some major doggie ADD, and it turns out wasn’t too concerned about the race – he came in sixth out of six in his heat.

To his credit, he was in second for most of the race, totally focused on getting the dog in front of him. Then he realized that there were four other dogs behind him, and he stopped to play with them. And they blew right by him, leaving him in last place.

Abandoned by the other dogs, he then started trying to get the people watching to play with him. Finally, he crossed the finish line.

Our wiener is no champion.

Watchmen starts showing in theaters soon, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited. The graphic novel is just awesome. Plot, characters, artwork – really, there is nothing about it to not love.

Flickr and YouTube both have a lot of promotional pictures and videos up, and they look great. Strictly speaking about physical appearance, it looks like they did a great job casting (with the exception of Veidt, who I am on the fence about). Rorschach and The Comedian both look very true to the original concept.

I do have one concern – the ending. The original story does not have what most would consider a happy ending. I have read that the film will have a different ending, and hopefully at least a little bit of artistic integrity is maintained. If the movie ends with Hollywood rainbows and sunshine, I’ll be at least a little disappointed.

Who am I kidding? Even if the ending is sunshine and rainbows, I’m still going to watch it and enjoy the hell out of it.

It’s tax season again, and this is our first year of filing married and having the house, so I’m anxious to get everything filed to see how it all shakes out.

Naturally, this means that somehow our forms are going to get fouled up. Sure enough, today I received the 1098 from Countrywide, and something doesn’t seem quite right – box 5, which is normally used for reporting property tax paid, is blank.

I called countrywide to ask about this – we paid almost two thousand dollars in taxes and at least part of this is deductible. After navigating one of the most frustrating automated menus that I’ve ever experienced, I finally talked to a real person. This person explained that they did report my tax paid to the IRS, but they don’t print it on the 1098 because “almost no one uses that on their return”. She also gave me the amount and told me that I should just be able to write it down and tell it to my tax person.

So… Property tax paid is tax deductible on federal income tax returns, and you are telling me that “almost no one uses that”?

Horseshit. Hopefully the person that does our taxes will be able to work with me using the information we have.

Countrywide – F+

I managed to get a speeding ticket back in early November. The ticket says that I can pay the ticket after fifteen days, which would be November 25th.

The ticket also says that I have thirty days from that date to pay the ticket – that makes my payment due by no later than Christmas day.

Well, if you are paying attention, you may have noticed that today is February 2nd. As of right now, I have not paid my ticket. I don’t even know how much I’m supposed to pay.

Within two days of getting the ticket, I gave it to a friend of mine who is a lawyer and can get the ticket reduced to a non moving violation. He wasn’t able to fix it right away because it was a handwritten ticket and some clerk hadn’t entered it into the system yet. In fact, it was January 7th before the ticket was in the system, and the county assigned me a court date of February 4th.

Today, we called to make sure everything was ok for our court date, and we found out from the clerk that they THINK they have received the request to change the ticket, but they aren’t sure where it is and they haven’t entered it in the system yet.

Guys? The fucking court date is WEDNESDAY. Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, you should process that request before the court date so that we can get the new charges and PAY THE FUCKING THING? It’s been three months. Three!

It’s no wonder that all things government are bankrupt and broken.

More than a year has passed since I posted anything here. While I use the web space quite a bit for file transfers and sharing, I really do mean to use the site for bitching and moaning (err, blogging) too.

In an effort to better utilize my site, organize and clear my thoughts, and hopefully improve my writing skills, I will be trying my damnedest to make a post per day for at least the entire month of february.

We are what we repeatedly do – hopefully at the end of the month I will have established a habit and keep up with it.

Wish me luck!

Pets are a pretty common part of life for a lot of people. Dogs, cats, hamsters, fish, whatever – many people have some kind of pet.

Laura and I have different pets. We have all kinds of crazy pets – three leopard geckos, four ferrets, a fish tank, a dog, and Laura has had rats. I have had a pet for about 5 years that was always my go-to guy when I wanted to show off the collection – Spike the hedgehog. Spike was a handful of prickly cute attitude. If you woke him up, he was fussy and curled up into a ball, but once calmed down he was the perfect gentleman of hedgehogs.

Spike hadn’t been acting quite right lately, and while we had a vet appointment scheduled, it just wasn’t soon enough. I came home from work the day of the vet appointment to find that he had died that day.

Laura had just purchased a new camera lens for Christmas, and we had said on new years day (our fifth anniversary of getting Spike) we were going to get him out and take a bunch of pictures with the new gear. We were tired on new years, and almost didn’t do it, but I really wanted to, so we got him out, gave him a bath, trimmed his nails, and took pictures until he fell asleep, totally exhausted from all the excitement.

That was Tuesday. When we came home from work on Thursday, I went to get him out to take him to the vet and found that he had died.

He will be missed. It took him three of the five years I had him to get him comfortable coming out during the day, but the past few years he’s been coming out during the day, eating, drinking, and running in his wheel all in broad daylight.

So last Sunday was our first major ice storm this year. There had been some freezing rain and sleet in the prior week, but that Sunday night was the first time this season that ice had actually accumulated on roads, cars, and walkways.

Well an icy Sunday made for a really shitty Monday. Well, I guess some of this shit happened on Tuesday, but it was all in the same 24 hour period, so it counts.

I started off a little late. I overslept – which I normally do – so I wound up leaving my house around 8:25. I’m supposed to be at work by 8:30 and I live about 7 minutes away, but as long as I’m here by 8:37 no one cares. As my foot hits the pavement at the top of the concrete porch steps, I immediately lost it and slipped. All of a sudden, my feet were above my head, my head hit two of the steps on the way down, I bruised a rib and banged up my shoulder.

After laying there for a few minutes, I got up, made sure I didn’t tear any clothing or make a big ass mess of myself, and started cleaning the ice off of my car. I couldn’t find my ice scraper, so I had to clean the ice off of my car with a squeegee that I stole from a gas station a few years ago. Needless to say, it didn’t work very well. I found the scraper later, naturally after I didn’t need it anymore.

Work wasn’t bad, actually. It was a pretty uneventful day other than an audit committee meeting, which required very little from me (especially compared to the other various board and trustee meetings that happen this time of year.)

Once I was back at home, I sat down in the bathroom on the closed toilet to take off my shoes, get undressed, and get in the shower. After I took off my shoes, I leaned back and hit my head on the overhead cabinet above the toilet. I’ve lived in this house for over twenty years, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened.

Monday night is the only night with TV shows that I’m really interested in. Thanks to the writer’s strike, two of the three shows I watch are now on hiatus, and Journeyman is the last one on. On my way to the couch to watch Journeyman, I stubbed three toes on the solid wood coffee table.

In the middle of Journeyman, the power went off. Kind of. Things like lights and lamps were still getting some power, but major appliances like TV’s, cable boxes, fridges, ovens, et cetera were out. Well I had the iron plugged in to iron work clothes for Tuesday. Silly me had assumed that if things like TVs weren’t getting power, then surely the electricity thirsty iron wouldn’t be working either, right? Wrong. I burned my hand on the iron while the power was out.

Finally I just went to bed. The power came back on around midnight, and so when everything came back to life, I got up and set my alarm clock, which sits on a table just about arms length away from my bed (which is a futon). 6:30 AM, the alarm goes off, and I roll over to snooze it, which I usually do two or three times each morning. As I rolled over to hit the button, I guess the center of gravity of the bed changed. The futon tilted sharply, and I fell out of bed.

So to sum up, in my clumsiness/messiness/general stupidity, I:

Fell down concrete steps, hitting my head
Had to scrape ice off of my car with a squeegee
Hit my head on an overhead cabinet
Stubbed three toes on a coffee table
Burned my hand on the iron while the power was out
Fell out of bed turning off the alarm clock

All in 24 hours.

I am a walking birth defect.