Nothing major to report today. I wanted to update readers on a couple of things that might be of interest, to those keeping score at home.

Ok, I posted back in April I posted about electricity, and my plan to cut back, and save buckets of money each month. Well, the "measured" month is over so I wanted to let everyone know the results. They were far better than my wildest dreams. In case you missed the post, it can be found here: http://a0001718.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-cranked-out-my-first-loaf-of.html.

In a nutshell, I bought a programmable thermostat for my air conditioner, and replaced all the lights in my house with compact fluorescent light bulbs. Then I turned off my TVs when I was not actively watching them, as well as any lights not currently being used. For the lights, I am lazy, so I bought a few more X10 switches so that I can control them from my remote. This way if I settle in on the couch, I don't have to get back up to turn off unused lights. I also used to leave the TV on quite a bit while not watching it, and now I don't. Ok, Last year, my electricity bill for the period of mid-April to mid-May was $156.87. This year, which I should mention has been the hottest on record in a while for the time period, was $109.54, which is right at a 30% savings. A whopping $47.33! In my mind, there is a table with a bunch of stiff electric company suits sitting around pounding their fists on the desk calling me ripe bastard for figuring out "the trick" that leads to their ultimate demise.

That is quite a dramatic reduction, any way you slice it. The next 5 months are the hottest of the year, so it will be interesting to see how I fare the rest of the summer. Here in Texas, the mid-July to mid-August is the pinnacle of hot, and my electricity bill during that period last year was $289.91. So that will be the true test.

Ok, the next update is regarding the grill issues I am experiencing as you may have seen in my post: http://a0001718.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-have-reached-turning-point-that-i.html. With my new plan of being really aggro on reducing debt, I decided to spend the lower amount, and repair the grill, rather than spending $700+ on a new one. I went with the cheaper ceramic coated cast iron burners, rather than the new brass ones. This saved me 50% on parts cost. The total for all the parts was $181. This is not too bad considering it replaces everything inside my grill. This should easily carry me another 5 years, at which point I can reconsider buying a new one. Maybe I will photo-document the process of repairing the old grill, that could make a half interesting post.

Now that I mention it, I have reached absolute critical mass on debt reduction. After careful consideration, I chopped my 401k input temporarily to 0%. Coupling that with my recent pay raise from work, I am now able to pay well over $1000 to the credit card company each month, and not really affect my lifestyle much at all. I am still paying myself into a savings account, still investing in the stock market, and still setting some aside for vacation expenses later in the year. At this rate, my debt will be gone lickety split, and I can buy a house farther away from the city. I don't like the city anymore I don't think. That's a post for another day though.

Anyway, eat that fuckers!

I have a post, but it is too picture intensive for blogspot, so I stuck it over on

http://www.snotpocket.com/SQFgarden.htm


If you are too stupid to figure out how to click on the link, or are too lazy, or you just want a condensed version here are the highlights:

1. build a square foot garden out of old stuff. That ends up looking something like this:



2. Fill it up with special dirt. Then it looks like this:



3. Then plant stuff and keep it watered. Something like this:

I recommend you follow the link to see the full spread, because it can't be done proper justice here.

If you don't follow the link, then you support terrorists, and you want little kittens to die painfully, and you are some kind of big asshole.

So, it was bit hot out today. I decide to go ahead and catch a quick breeze while I make my gentle drive through the horse farm area on my way home. All of maybe 3 seconds later, a fucking bee flies in my helmet at about 45 miles an hour, stings me below and to the left of my left eye, and gets trapped in my fucking helmet!

At first I didn't feel it, then I started thinking about how if something flew in, it couldn't possibly have gotten out. So I glance over in my rear view mirror, and I see what appears to be a little bloody spot or something, and a few inches away is the bee. So I start flailing wildly about my head trying to get it out, never thinking about what an awesome idea it would be to stop, or even slow down a little. I check maybe 15 seconds later in the mirror, and the bug is gone, but the spot is still there. I kind of shrug it off until it starts providing some pulsating pain. At that point I realized what happened and figured there was nothing I could do about it, so I kept cruising. When I came to a stop sign, I took another look, closer this time, and realized what I thought was a bloody spot was actually the damn stinger hanging out of my fuckin face! By this time it had injected enough poisonous material to make my face puffy and discolored.

Fortunately, I am not allergic to stings, or I would have been a goner for sure, I was more or less in the middle of nowhere. I am not sure how long anaphylaxis takes to screw someone over, but it would have been at least 5-10 minutes before I was anywhere that I could likely get any sort of help.

Anyhoo, so now I have a big purpley swollen patch on my face, which, although I am sure adds character, I would gladly trade in exchange for not having one. So what have we learned today?

1. Leave your visor up. Bee stings don't hurt unless you are a pussy. Plus, chicks dig scars.
2. Well, I guess there was just that one.

OK, its been about two weeks since I posted. First off, I am not dead. I have just been rather busy with various things. Secondly, I am working on a big project that I plan to post about, but to do a proper write up, I need to be completed, and I am waiting on a couple of parts to come in. I can assure you it will be informative and entertaining, and worth the wait. The other things I have been working are either not post worthy, or perhaps things I have already posted on before. I have not even experienced any wackiness in a couple weeks that merit postal effort.

I feel bad for making this post with virtually no substance so I will squeeze in one observation I made last night. We went to the grocery store to buy groceries. We usually go on Saturday afternoons, but this week is our annual crawfish boil, so we went on a Friday night instead. We also went to a different grocery store than we usually go to, to mix it up a bit. Anyway, we bought some ice cream sandwiches. Our normal store usually only has our favorite brand in vanilla flavor. The new store had a combo of chocolate and vanilla in the same box, so we went for it. We got home and decided to sample the sandwiches. I opened the box and the sandwiches were flat. It almost appeared as if they had been squished. I inspected the box and did not see any signs of stress whatsoever. upon further inspection, I noticed that some of the ice cream in a couple of the sandwiches had melted to the point where the water content of the ice cream had separated from it, and refroze. So it looked rather disgusting. Apparently, these sandwiches had melted almost completely, then got stuck back in the freezer. This is unacceptable. Luckily, they were on sale, so I got two boxes. I dive head first all off into the other box. Wha...? These are melted too!! Son of a whore! Now what the fuck am I gunna do.

I debated for about 10 minutes on the correct course of action. It would cost maybe a buck, 2 at the most, in gas money to go back to the store. It would easily be 2 more bucks worth of pain in my ass. So that's maybe 4 bucks. The 2 boxes if sandwiches were only 6 bucks total. so I would damn near break even if I just said fuck it, and went back the next day to get some more. I decided instead, to return the sandwiches immediately. I really wanted to eat one, and I didn't want to let "the man" get the upper hand with his oppression this time. We decided to take my gal's more fuel efficient vehicle to return them.

We entered the store and marched right up tot he service desk. no one was behind the counter. I looked around for one of those old school ding bells that you ring for service. No such luck. There was a young man in a store uniform doing something along side the counter on the same side of it as I was. He says "Uh... the service desk is actually closed, it closes at like 8". This immediately made me think two bizarre thoughts. 1. He did not need to use the word 'actually' in that sentence, he could have just said that the service desk "was closed", and 2. he said 'like' 8. Well, maybe to me, 4 is like 8, or 11 is like 8. I glanced at my watch and it was around 10:30. I raised the sack up to his eye level and said "What about my bad ice cream?".

He went on to say that if I just wanted to switch them out, that he approved of the switch out, and that it would be no problem whatsoever, I could just go grab them, and everything would be cool. Wow, he didn't even want to see the receipt. OK, Cool. So I go back and grab two more boxes. This time, I grab two from way at the back. I carry them back to where I left the other ones laying. While approaching the other sandwiches, I see the guy walk out the door. Hmm.

Well, now what? As much as I am a non conformist, I don't want to be accused of shoplifting or anything. Maybe he will be back in a minute. So I commence to popping open the new boxes of sandwiches to make certain that they are not bunk like the last ones. They are 100% primo. Perfect specimens. I stand around for all of 30 seconds waiting for anyone to take take notice, or for the guy to return and I get neither. Fuck it. So I walk out with my sandwiches. We get int he car and start to back out of the spot, and there goes the guy, in his truck, leaving. I guess his shift was over.

Now, in my head, I think about my former sandwiches laying on the service desk melting. The only employee having any idea of why they were there had just left. So tomorrow morning perhaps someone see a large pile of nasty goo on the service desk. They wonder why they are there. I know its unrealistic, but in my head at this point, they review some sort of magic security tape to see how they got there. They see me walk in and set them down, bring up two more boxes, open them, pour them out on the counter, stuff them back in the box, then leave, and they are mystified for weeks.

OK, so whats the point? None, really, I told you I didn't have anything solid to post on. I guess the point of the amazingly boring anecdote is just that customer service isn't what it used be. These young kids don't give a shit about anything except beer and poontang. But can you blame them? I can't. I used to be them. Now I am still them, but beer and poontang are a hell of a lot easier to come by, so I have time to ponder customer service.

VAGINA

So I have been toying with the idea of paying extra payments for my motorcycle for a while. Part of the process involved seeing how my current payments were applied. I got one of my statements in the mail and did some quick math... I was shocked at the results. Each month, I pay my normal monthly payment of $114.46. OK, so $64.66 of that goes towards the principal, and 49.80 goes towards interest. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but that means 56% of my money is going to cut down the amount I owe on the bike, and a whopping 44% magically disappears into the "banking void". This seems a little askew, but I am no banking or loan specialist so what do I know? I guess with the way amortization works out, it is dead on, I just never spent much time thinking about it.

I decided to try and send a little extra and maybe add a note saying "apply to principal only", or something of that nature. During this experiment, I discovered a limitation of my current online only banking situation with my "Electric Orange" ING Direct banking account. One way to send payments with ING is to virtually "write a check". When you do this it brings up a check on the screen, and you fill it out like you would any check.

Here is where I ran into problem #1. The memo line, where I would screw over GE Money bank (who holds my Yamaha Installment Financing loan) by paying less interest than they want me to, by writing "principal only", would only accept some ridiculously low amount of characters, which would not even be enough for my entire 16 digit account number. If I had a paper check and a pen, I could pretty much put as much crap in the memo line as I saw fit.

Problem #2 come when I tried to fill out the check. When I put in "GE Money Bank" in the payee section, it automatically populated the entire thing with the information from my normal electronic payments payees address book. This is problematic because ING will automatically send the payment electronically rather than sending a paper check, if the "to" institution is setup to accept electronic payments. This means it automatically goes out of "virtual check writing" mode and back into normal electronic payment mode, which does not feature a memo line anywhere.

So this took me back to square one. Well, now what? I decided to send them an extra $20 using the normal electronic payment method anyway, just to see what would happen. Again, I was shocked at the results. I figured that they would simply apply the $20 towards my next payment, subtracting from the $114.46 I owed them for the next month. Well, it didn't work that way at all. I am sure it doesn't matter at all, but I should mention here that I do not pay them once a month as I get my statements. Instead, I do like I do with everything else, and pay them every other time I get a paycheck from work. This results in my always being a ahead by a payment or two. Anyway, so I paid them the normal amount of $114.46, and the next day sent them the additional $20 payment. How did the extra payment get applied? $18.36 went to principal, and 8% went to interest!!

What the shit? Is that how stuff works? Again, I am no grand financial wizard, but this seems very odd. I guess my knowledge of amortization functionality is limited, but it seems like A. it would be in the bank's best interest to not allow extra payments, or at least apply the extra payments divided differently, and that B. everyone should always make extra payments on everything if possible, even if it is only a few bucks here and there.

If I pay an extra $20 a month, I will chop an entire year off my loan term, and if I pay an extra $20 each time I get paid, rather than each month, I will knock off another 6-8 months. This seems to save me shitloads of cash, and screw the bank over to some extent at the same time... two things that make me smile.

Kill whitey!

I do not have any kids. I like other people's kids, but I never really seemed to want any of my own thus far. A lot of my friends have kids now. The other day, a bunch of us went to Germanfest in Muenster, Texas. We spent a bulk of the time sitting in front of a jungle gym type apparatus. There was other stuff to do, but it was more of just a social gathering to hang out more than anything.

As I sat there and the kids played, I watched a lot of parents deal with their children and it made me realize that a lot of people are really fucking stupid, and are horrible parents. The jungle gym featured a nifty slide with a hump in the middle for added enjoyment Some of these parents would take their child, and manually lift them up to the top of the slide, while the other parent would be waiting crouched at the bottom of the slide to catch them. After each trip down the fun chute, the parent at the bottom would scoop up the child and cheer for joy. I assume because their stupid fucking kid had fallen prey to gravity, rather than magically floating away somehow. So then the other parent would take the child and place them once again at the top of the slide. This fucking kid did not have to do shit the whole time. I should mention, by the way, that this child was plenty old enough to climb the ladder on their own. What in God's green hell are you teaching your child by doing this? To be a pussy? That everything will just be taken care of for them if they just sit there? This is a mother fucking shame. These morons should be jailed or institutionalized.

And it wasn't just one set of parents, I saw plenty acting just like this. I'd hate to go on a diatribe of how "when I was young" this or that was different, but give me a break. Give me the good old days, where you parents taught you valuable life lessons by letting your explore and figure things out on your own. People used to teach their children not to touch hot things by letting them touch it once, burn themselves, and then that's that. I suppose these days that would be considered some sort of child abuse, instead of a learning experience. I learned to swim because my dad took me to the lake and threw me off the pier. I guess that sounds funny laying it like that, but that is essentially what happened. I was not afraid, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and begged him to toss me into the water again and again. If someone were to see a parent do that now, I can assure you, they would be in jail by the end of the day.

I suppose that ultimately it is impossible to say that the kids I saw being 'nerfed' like that will turn out to be complete assholes, but I think its a relatively safe bet. I would also wonder what happened to these people in their childhoods to make them think that what they were doing is the right thing to do. I cannot comprehend not being able to take a look down the road and see why it might make their child spoiled. It would be incredibly amazing to follow a set of parents with a camera for 18 years, and track their parenting methodology documentary style.

I do spend quite a bit of time analyzing the world these days. I don't like the direction it has been going for a while now. I think the seeds have been planted, and things are in motion to eventually cause the downfall and eventual extinction of the human race. It will take a while, but it seems evident that it is well underway. People seem to get smarter, and less smart at the same time (not the same people). It seems that a portion of the population gets smarter as time goes by, while the other portion gets "more stupider". The problem is that the dumb population is overtaking the smart population, with no end in sight.

Fuck it, the world is going to explode.