Random Notes November 2007

Man I love these posts. Probably because I’m semi-ADD. Even though I’m not, I just like to say that I am as a partial excuse for wanting to move on to a completely separate topic out of nowhere.

I love online bill pay. I’ve been doing online bill payment ever since I worked for the bank(s). It was new 8 or so years ago. If you’re not using it now get with the new millennium. People don’t write checks to business anymore. I have nice little reminders I can even set for myself for transfers I want to make to and from bank accounts. It’s saved me the hassle of having another thing to remember – or *gasp* being late or completely missing a payment!

And on the topic of banking, have you noticed how on everyone’s (as in the bank’s) website they’re smiling? What’s the deal with that? All the financial institutions, banking, insurance, lenders, they have people smiling. Are they trying to tell us something? Maybe that having money makes you happy? Or maybe that being with that bank suddenly makes you burst in to a giant smile too large for a 1024 X 768 resolution? What are you guys so happy about? I hate when it seems like people are let in to some secret that I don’t know about. And maybe some sort of happiness secret since they’re face is glued to my screen…shining bright white teeth in all their glory.

It’s funny how that works. I can go up to someone who might be in too good of a mood. And it completely pisses me off (but I don’t let it show). Either I think they’re faking it, or I’m just hating on them because I’m not as chipper as they. But even in the opposite sense, if I go up to someone who’s pissed off, it makes me pissed off too. I guess I can’t win them all. Or win at all.

I hate stretch marks. They just feel weird. I have more than I think I should have. They’re right behind my armpit too. Some on my hip and inner thigh. Some in the fold of my arm. Weird crevices of skin that get itchy sometimes. I like to think that my body just grew too fast for itself. But it’s probably from lifting without stretching properly. Or maybe just stretching improperly. Either way, way to go me.

I’m currently reading a book called The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb. It’s totally a nerd book. Half philosophy half finance. If you’re a total nerd like I am and get geeked out about things like the collapse of hedge funds then you might want to check it out. “It’s a total mind fuck!” raves me. Reading it makes me think differently about catastrophic events that have happened in my lifetime. Actually it puts a spin on a lot of things in my life that I never would have even thought of. So yeah. Mind fuck.

Songs are constantly getting stuck in my head. And the problem is, I don’t listen to music while at work. As in, if a song is stuck in my head at 7 am, it’ll probably be there when I leave at 3 pm. Once a coworker brought his i-pod in for a week, and I think suddenly realized how anti-social he was being. Maybe that’s why he didn’t bring it again? Maybe it broke? Anyway, the worst is when you’re listening to new music and a song gets stuck in your head and you don’t even know the whole chorus yet. Just one line from the chorus. And then you’re stuck singing the guitar part and maybe drumming on your desk. Or maybe when there’s that song that’s way overplayed now, like “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie that gets stuck and won’t get unstuck. I feel like this happens so often to me…why me?

While shopping for new cars online, I was watching a show I DVR – Top Gear. Hilarious show, awesome cars. And it’s on the BBC too so maybe you get a little culture to go with it? Maybe. Anyway, they were driving around the Porsche 911 Turbo and praising it like mad. What I loved to hear though was how comfortable it was driving in the city – stop and go traffic, or possibly getting the groceries. Also, what blew me away (and don’t quote me on this) is that the new 911 was almost considered one of the LEV – or Low Emission Vehicles. Yup, as good as your average Honda Civic when it came to polluting the air. When I heard that (other than the fact that it’s on the bottom rung of what I would consider a “supercar”) I was sold. And the sick thing was that I could buy it! If I put $40K down and financed over 5 years my car payment (not including insurance mind you) would be $600. Leasing it and putting a lot less down - $10K – came out to about $900 a month which was a little less affordable but doable. Hey, if Michelle got a brand new car, shouldn’t I get my Porsche? He laughs. Anyway, it’s always fun to dream – but sometimes when you do the numbers and you realize you can make your dreams a reality you get a little bit sick.

I wanted to write up my Christmas list within this random notes post, however I think I might just make that it’s own post. I’m sure I could put up at least a page as to why I want the things I do for Christmas.

I didn’t write a post about Thanksgiving. I felt obligated to (it feels odd to admit that) so I decided against it. It’s something that a lot of people go through, and I’m sure a lot of us share the same experiences every year. Maybe one year if deep frying the turkey catches the lawn on fire I’ll blog about it, but just know I had a good time, we had it at our house, and both of our families helped out with the food. And what would thanksgiving be without football? The Turkey bowl hurt my neck. A week later I still do not feel that I have full range of motion turning my head from side to side. Well done tackle football on the frozen ground.

You know how you sign up for those newsletters or those daily emails? Like the thought of the day, or dictionary.com’s word of the day? I’m signed up on way too many of those lists. And it almost becomes a chore to read through them every single day. Oh great! 24 new emails in my inbox! *click* Hmmm, let’s see. Not one personal email or one that I could really care about. Darn! I missed the 30% off at Eastbay again! *sign out* Why do I continue to stay on those mailing lists when I could easily unsubscribe? I guess signing in to an empty inbox is never a good feeling (that is unless you’ve checked it in the past 24 hours) and you never know when you’ll come upon something you’re actually interested in.

This evening, after being persuaded by Peter Griffin of Family Guy fame standing in front of a sandwich from Subway, I had to go and pick up “The Feast” sandwich. It was after our first playoff basketball game (which we barely won – I’m worried about next week when we play the first seed) and typically I like to eat “healthy” after I run around. Subway I figure is healthy enough. “The Feast” for those who haven’t seen the commercial yet is 5 types of meat and of course all the veggies you want. I get all of the veggies except for jalapenos. I don’t understand people who go to subway (like my wife) and only get lettuce and pickles. Seriously? The rest of the veggies are free. Why not get more for your – no money? It doesn’t make sense to not load up on the veggies. And I’m thinking that right now my readers are getting hungry for subway – if that’s possible. I’ve never in my life craved Subway. That’s a bad thing Subway. You guys should work on that. Anyway, “The Feast” ended up beating me. I was only able to finish a little more than half of it (foot long). I blame the free bag of baked lays that came with it because of the points we had earned. Go Subway cards. I miss the stickers we used to get for buying sandwiches. 1 sticker for a 6” and 2 for a foot long. I couldn’t wait to get my sticker page all filled up and get my free sandwich. Those were such simpler times.

Today I was one of the guys I used to hate as a customer service representative. I called Comcast to complain about my recent rate change for DVR service. The rate for DVR went from $13.95 a month for $15.95. Therefore increasing my bill every month for cable and internet to $93.45. And if you are paying more than that for Comcast or whoever you are going through, you shouldn’t. There are probably people out there who are paying even less than I am for the same service, but that’s as much discount as I could finagle out of them. 6 months ago I was paying $133 a month for the services (if you can call them that) so I’m pretty happy about my savings. Either way, I had to call and let them know they had raised my bill. But of course! They’ve included a mailer with their last 2 month’s bills informing us idiots (Chris the rep didn’t use this word, that’s just how I felt after he told me that – because I knew he was probably thinking that) that the rate would be rising. That’s the stuff I automatically chuck in the “this needs to go out to the recycling bin” bin. Anyway, nothing has changed Comcast. Why are you charging me $2 more per month? Is it because you need to squeeze every last penny out of every client you have? That’s probably true. I mean, shoot, how many customers do you have? Let’s just take a shot in the dark and say 700,000 loyal (pfftt) customers. 700,000 X $2/month X 12 months = Damn that adds up quickly. You guys suck and I can’t wait till Google takes over everything and I can watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it and the only thing I’ll have to do to “pay” for it is to ignore a little text ad on the side bar of what I’m watching. Shake in your boots. Shake. They already dominate the internet, they’re moving to the wireless business and next they’re coming after you guys.

It’s a sad day when I’m calling the cable company complaining about a $2 rate increase.

Luckily in an hour and a half it’ll be Friday and that means the weekend which means naps. That’s probably why people like me like to stay up later on Thursday nights – because we know we can try and get that sleep back throughout the weekend.

I wish I could blog in the shower. I think a lot in there. About good blog ideas too. There was something I wanted to mention in this random notes post that I was thinking about in the shower, but now that I’m out of the shower I completely forgot.

Ah well.

What is the past tense of spasm? Totally random I know.

(It feels weird to end it like that, but here I am ending it within a parentheses – even more ironic that I wrote the actual word “parentheses” in here)

The Tuesday Afternoon Drive Home

It’s amazing I don’t have more nose bleeds.

Typically I can attribute a nose bleed to the dry climate. I usually get them in Vegas, Arizona or California. Sometimes in Eastern Washington during the summer. Just way too hot, and too dry for my nose to handle. I guess.

I’ve always just had this assumption that nose bleeds occurred from thinking too hard – or too much. Too much blood in that area of the body – it’s gotta get out somewhere. I’m sure that’s completely false, but whatever.

My commute is 10 minutes. 12 minutes on a bad day. For me to have such life altering self-analytical thoughts is just too much (maybe?).

Which got me thinking – I think I think – or over-think way more than I should. My mind is too active (definitely).

This post is supposed to be short because I started it later than I wanted to. And I wanted to get in at least 3 posts for November to try and keep up with getting close to that set goal I had for myself of blogging at least 4 times a month.

Anyway, as soon as I left work and got in my car here was my thought stream:

I was thinking about how people who have jobs have in some way sold their souls. They’ve put a price tag on the value of their time – and mainly their life and energy. How much are you worth on an hourly, monthly or yearly basis? Are you dead inside? Am I dead inside?

And how is that we all continue to lie to ourselves? The lie that more is always better? Or am I the only one that thinks this could possibly be a lie? Am I the only one that thinks of this kind of stuff while driving home on a Tuesday afternoon? Maybe I am thinking way too much.

But seriously though. What lies do we tell ourselves that help us make it through each day? Maybe it’s about your health, or your finances. Possibly your relationships with your friends and family or the satisfaction from your recent payment for your soul. Is it that things are better than you think they are? Or maybe worse than you perceive? That perception – it’s a tricky thing. Always brings me back to, “If you a tell a lie enough, it becomes truth/people begin to believe it”. Or however that saying goes. I can tell myself plenty of times that being in that cubicle for 8 hours a day is the best use of my time. A lot of the other people I know are doing it. But do I believe it’s the best thing I could be doing right now?

My coworker said something interesting yesterday. We were commiserating about how gloomy of a Monday it was, and how it all felt very isolated – just us and our monitors. And she said something interesting that has stuck with me, which I was also thinking about on the way home.

She said that she was “Wishing it was Wednesday already”. Well, maybe those weren’t her exact words. Maybe it was Thursday – or the weekend. But I like to think Wednesday, because it’s optimistic, but not too ahead of ourselves. But what I remember of our conversation is what caught me. While we sat there and continued to sell our souls – we were wishing time to move faster – forward – skip ahead - we were actually wishing our lives away. Shouldn’t we take Monday, or any day for what it is? Not try to discount it or look past it? Could it be possible that after so many wishing away of Mondays-Thursdays we could wish for them back in future? As a kid I wished I was a teenager. A teenager wishing to be an adult. Very soon that wishing is going to catch up with me I’m afraid.

And then I was home. And opening the garage. And parking the car.

Getting out of the car, closing the garage. Opening up the door to the house.

And thinking about how there probably aren’t very many people out there who question their state of mind – their thoughts on their own life as much as I do on their afternoon commute. I even had my radio on to hopefully drown out these “meaning of life” questions that tend to haunt me from time to time to no avail. I still have no answers for many of my questions. And I honestly feel that questioning myself like this can leave me in a bit of turmoil.

Thank God I get to write it all out to confirm my looney bin escapee status.

She Rides Again

On November 9^th, 2007 I got the dreaded call from my wife – a call that I’ve missed in the past (not verbatim but close):

“Hey, I just stopped at Jiffy Lube and the guy said they couldn’t work on the car because there’s coolant all over the engine. They said to take it to a mechanic immediately.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time. Or at least right after the call.

Her car had broken down before. And always come back to life. We had talked about the price of fixing the car versus the value of the car. Kelly Blue Book gave us a dollar amount of $1300 in excellent condition. It could at best be considered “good” condition. And in broken down condition? A pile of scrap metal basically.

The maximum we were willing to spend to fix the car was $500. Almost half of the price of the actual vehicle we thought.

But as soon as we realized that the car may not be worth fixing we started the car shopping. Toyota, Honda, Lexus…we even drove in and out of a Mercedes Benz dealership. Luckily no one was there. Remind me to go car shopping during the summer. It’s much warmer at night.

About 6 months ago, I was looking online for cars (just for fun) and noticed that Honda had come out with a Civic Si – but this time in Sedan form. Wow. I looked. I wished. I drooled. Good price too! $21K – they weren’t expecting too much – a fraction more than what I had bought my Si back in May of 2000 for.

A few days later the call came through that it wasn’t worth it to fix the car – from the mechanic. News got to my in-laws and my father in law offered to fix it as a “project car”. We just had to cover the parts.

What at first glance looked like we had to purchase another car now suddenly became a choice.

And I struggled with it. A lot.

It was my head versus my guts. I didn’t like it at all.

Here’s a bit of what has been running through my head the past few weeks:

Pros of getting a new car:

-It’s a new car. I don’t expect to have problems with it for at least the next 3 years. And if we do they would all be covered by the warranty. I know who has driven the car, who has owned it and how they’ve treated it. And as much as people say buying a new car isn’t that smart financially – no one really ever mentions the risks associated with even buying cars that are “dealer certified”.

-It’s got almost everything that my wife wanted in a car – except for the heated seats. It’s got head lights that actually illuminate the road, a radio that works and displays the time properly, a sun roof, and most importantly 4 doors.

-We were offered one heck of a deal from a friend of the family. Sticker on the Si sedans is $24K (or more if you get swindled out of it). We were given the dealership cost plus $500. $20,700. Go out and try to get an Si right now. I guarantee they won’t go any lower than $23,000 for you. They’re in high demand, sales people know that, and you’ll have one hell of a time even arguing $1,000 off the top.

-The financing they are offering us is almost unbeatable. 2.9% I can definitely handle. In a situation like this it makes sense to pay down my mortgage first over this car. Of course I would be much happier with a 0% interest rate, but literally the difference comes to a few hundred dollars over 3 years. I burn a few hundred dollars doing less worthy things.

-The car is exactly the car I would’ve wanted for my wife. It’s a stick. It’s quick. It’s 4 doors and reliable. But it’s black and doesn’t stand out. I won’t dread driving “her car” if she wants me to. I have seen families before who are “all sticks (manuals or standards)” – and I thought it was the coolest thing. I also hold people who drive sticks (or who know how) up on a pedestal. Call me crazy, but after driving a stick for 7 years through all that traffic I still love it and wouldn’t change a thing.

-Hopefully she can be happy now in really the only thing that wasn’t “nice” in her life – and that was her car. Now instead of getting made fun of by her friends maybe they can be a little bit jealous.

-We wouldn’t know exactly how long her old Pontiac Sunfire would last – even if it was fixed. And we didn’t know when her dad would get around to actually fixing it. I didn’t want to drive his truck to work anymore. It’s fun to drive every now and then, but every day to work and not being able to even fit it in a parking spot, let alone park it? Last night I filled up a little over a quarter tank yesterday in gas and it was $35. No thanks 11 miles per gallon. If we did wait for the Pontiac to get fixed it might be another month or more of driving the truck. And when the Pontiac did get fixed the car might die again in a month, or three and we’d be looking for another car again.

Cons of getting a new car:

-We were 3 months away from finishing all of the debt on the investment property we own. So close I could taste the extra money. We financed all the upgrades to the condo on 0% interest rate cards and it’s saved us a lot of heartache and also given us a lot of flexibility and freedom that paying a lot of those costs up front would not have. Those are two things we won’t be feeling for the next few months until we get those cards paid off.

-We go from $0 in car payments to at least $375 a month. Insurance is going to go up anywhere between $50 to $75 a month. To round up, this is going to be an extra $500 a month we’re going to have to come up with – where from, I’m not really sure. We’re pretty well spent every month. And this is really what has scared the heck out of me. I know that she has a pretty solid job, and I’m not worried about her – but I’m not so sure of myself. The other day I received an email from Ticketmaster about a concert in May of 2008. I couldn’t believe that they were sending me an email about May of next year! Seriously? I can’t even think of what February of 2008 is going to be like, let alone next May! Maybe I’m paranoid and pay way too much attention to what is going on in the market, but I feel like 2008-2009 are going to be some of the toughest economic times the US has ever seen. I hope for all of our sakes I am wrong.

-Along with her friends/family being jealous of the new car, I get to be the main hater. I bought the car for her, but I don’t want it for myself. It’s a beautiful car. It’s the reincarnation of my first true car love – my old Si (RIP). Seeing it parked in the garage, and washing it and vacuuming it from time to time, knowing that it probably never sees redline through 3 gears…it’s going to pain me a bit. I know, it’s terrible, people are probably laughing at this right now, but it’s just not my car. And I do it to myself almost as a kind of motivation. The proverbial carrot in my own garage. “Look at what amazing material things you can buy yourself if you work hard enough!” Sad, but true. I am hoping that the novelty of the new car wears off within 3 months. And if not then, hopefully in 3years.

-A friend of mine gave me some good advice about cars. Obviously everyone knows they are a waste of money. But for some of us in this country, they are a necessity. He said that you should only buy a car when your old car is completely unbearable to drive. This will probably stick with me when it comes to my car. But my wife’s old car wasn’t unbearable. It just needed a lot of work and I guess money we didn’t want to spend to fix it.

We will never know how long that Sunfire will run though. For the car’s sake I hope for years to come. We went out and bought the 2008 Civic Si Sedan this afternoon. $22,800 after taxes. We put down $10,000 of my investment earnings and drove it home through an hour and a half of traffic. I’m glad I drove my car out there and I was able to watch my wife follow me home in her new car. From what I remember when I bought my Si back in 2000 – there’s an immediate “love at first drive” that you get when you first drive a car that you really want. Luckily for me I wasn’t driving or riding with her tonight. I’ll stick with my car with no car payment for as long as I can.

So after 2 and a half weeks we made the decision to just suck it up and deal with the financial consequences as they come. How in the world does everyone else do it? They just view the car payment as a necessary evil? I suppose I’m in that boat now too.

The car is perfect. I thought I saw maybe 1 or 2 scratches on it, that ended up being dry water spots from it’s washing this afternoon. It’s got the new car smell and had 17 miles on it. We were told that it was going to have “10 miles or less” on it so I’m sure one of the mechanic boys (they looked like a bunch of kids younger than me) took it out for a bit of a joy ride. That’s fine. It’s in good hands now.

So for this round, my gut won out. The smart financial thing to do would’ve been to take the risk of driving the Sunfire for as long as we could and save as much as possible so that we could buy another beater that could be driven for another 10 years. But sometimes in life you have to live it up a little and treat yourself for working so hard. November 20^th, 2007. Welcome to the family once again, Civic Si.

Side prayer:

Please don’t let it get all banged up in an accident or any big scratches or dents for at least the first few years of ownership.

Also, you took my first one away from me God. Maybe because I was too proud of it? Or maybe the money earned from the parts sold from it were able to feed hungry families? Either way, do you mind if we keep this one for longer than 2 years this time? I know it’s silly, but at the time it was pretty painful to lose my car. My wife says I’m still mad about it almost 5 years later. It’s possible that I am.

Thanks for your consideration.