Family

My Family. Family tradition of taking a photo of everyone sitting on the stairs. Including dogs, would have included the cats if they didn't hate the dogs. The white dog is my parents' (Claire), and the orange one is my sister's (Remington)--they have their Christmas jackets on because my sister's dog is a wimp and thinks it's too cold in Colorado; Claire only has her jacket on because it's the ONLY jacket that my mom and sister have ever put on her where she didn't have this look on her face like "oh god, what are they doing to me? please make it stop!"

As per usual

I do not remember what it was i was going to write about today. DAMMIT!

Homes for Sale!!

As Shawn and I were watching a bunch of home improvement shows on cable this last Sunday, we did start discussing how much our home is worth. You see, there's this show that basically has people asking realtors to give them a fair value for their house if they sold it in the current market as is. And in all cases, the people were over-estimating the value of their home. Which just emphasises the fact that most people think their house is worth more than it really is.

I estimate our house could sell for $135k, but Shawn insists that it would go for closer to $150k. This of course spawned another "Let's search Realtor.com" bonanza. I found out that there are two houses for sale on the street behind us. One just went on the market a week ago or so, and it's 1625 sq ft (about 350 sq ft larger than our house) going for $165 (and I think they just dropped the price by $4000 because I swear it was at $169 when I looked at it yesterday). The other house is 1850 sq ft going for $135 which I thought was a bit on the low side unless the house was just a mess, but today when I walked by it, I found out that it's actually a foreclosure, but it looked pretty good from what I could see (of course the most expensive fixes for any house are the ones you can't see from the outside).

Then of course, there are houses that really gained in value because of the Domain being built. Houses in that area probably gained about $50k just because they're within walking distance. Lucky bastards.

Of course watching one of those "What will 250k get you in _____" and apparently you could get some nice houses in Kona, Hawaii for $150k in 2004 and now most of those houses are closer to $350k.

Man, it really is all about Location, Location, Location.

sicko

I'm home sick today. I think its food poisoning, though I guess it could be the flu...though I doubt it if only because I don't feel like I was hit by a truck nor do I think I have a fever. But still the worst part about being home with stomach issues is that every time I need to fart or burp, I only feel safe about doing so in the bathroom--just in case. Bah.

Life Changes

I've been feeling that I haven't been blogging as much lately as I used to (which is obviously a lie since I logged more entries in October, November, and December each than I did in April and May combined, but I feel that everything is of a lower caliber. Which is funny because I know I set the bar SO HIGH).

I have come to realize that the reason I don't blog as much as I used to is because I used to blog when I got home from work before Shawn did. But now I come home from work at the EXACT same time as Shawn since we now carpool. That's us--saving the planet one car ride at a time, but also seriously cutting into my blogging time.

Also, because of the copious amounts of comment spam (which has seemed to get out of hand rather quickly--I blame the Twitter feed I added), I've had to enable Captcha Verification. Sorry, dudes!

So What to Blog About? Nothing interesting is happening aside from GRAY KITTEH! I let him in the house today (what? it was totally cold and windy outside), Shawn wasn't too happy with that. Which is only funny because that animal was walking around our house all day Sunday last week, what with the windows not being in their window holes and what have you. Anyhow, I know you all just come here for pictures of GRAY KITTEH! and now, for your viewing pleasure:

Window Replacement: In Pictures

Step One: Destruction.

Step Two: More Destruction. Also, I swear I feed him. Really.

Step Three: Framing.

Step Four: Screwing. Hehe.

Step Five: Ta-Da!! And it only took 3 hours. For this one.

You asked for it...

Gray Kitteh!

Facey-Spaces

Been having some conversations with people today about facebook and privacy and the internet and whatnot.

There is no privacy anymore unless you're in the bathroom, and now with blogs and Twitter you can even update people on that too. Pictures you post anywhere on the internet have the possibility of being found by your employer. Nothing is truly ever 'deleted', unless you go through the hassle of overwriting it with 1s and 0s, but I don't know if that's even possible on the internet since everything goes to somewhere else. Email provides ads based on keywords in your email (apparently typing suicide/death/9-11/murder somewhere in the body prevents ads...but it probably also puts you on the terrorist watch list). Our cell phones have GPS in them and it can be remotely enabled. The president isn't the most powerful man in the world, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are. Except in China.

I'm just waiting for the day when they put a chip in my brain that will play advertisements based on which store I'm walking by. The epitome of consumerism. I can just sense it. It's coming. It's like that short story about how the government decided to make everyone equal so those that were graceful had to walk around with sandbags tied to them, those that were innovative had a loud squawking noise go off in their brain every 10 minutes to prevent any new thoughts. And I don't remember who wrote this story...probably Shirley Jackson. Possibly Garth Nix. Anyhow, yes. WAVE OF THE FUTURE I tells ya.

Also, it is apparently de-lurking day. So for all yas out there, leave a comment to let me know you read my blog (drivel, though it may be).

[edited to add] yes, I realize how ironic that I post about this when I am obviously a Google fangirl--phone, email, search engine, blog. Just pointing out how technology will take over the world, especially if someone who will use it to their advantage is in charge...which means that at this point I love Eric Schmidt. Ergo: Please don't whack me, Googleplex!

Cats

Here are some pictures for my sister (who refers to Quazi as her "grand-nephew kitty"). This year, for Christmas, the cats received a huge bag of toys treats and other such stuffs from their "cousin", Remy (my sister's dog):
Ivy coming out of the little "house". Dani got it figuring that Quazi would like it, but it has actually become Ivy's new favored hiding place. It sits next to the chair, and she likes it because two of the 'doors' are on the backside so she can get in and out without having to go in the front door.

Ivy playing with "Cheepers" This damn bird toy is covered in cat nip so both cats love it and every time they bat at it, it does this obnoxious chirping thing. Which drives the cats wild. They also love the little mice. I came home from work the other day and one of the cats had crawled into the bag to retrieve the mice. The mice in which I had never shown to the cats. So someone must have smelt the catnip. Of the three mice, one had been ripped from the packaging (a cardboard back), and the other two were still attached. All three were COMPLETELY covered in cat spit. Like they were 50% heavier because of cat spit. Ew. I haven't taken the other stuff out yet mostly because we dole out toys throughout the year, otherwise they'd end up with all of them under the couch within a week.

So Thank You Aunt, Dani.



Now then, for the rest of you. If you've been following my half-assed posting the last two days, or have been reading my Tweets, then you know that we've had a gray tabby kitten hanging around in our backyard. We don't know if he's a stray, but we think he MUST have a home because he doesn't just hang out in our yard all the time (he does actually leave for large periods of time). He's very people friendly and he follows Quazi around and vice versa. Ivy puts up with him being around but he isn't allowed within 3 feet of her. He does have ear mites (our cats are on Advantage Multi so they won't get any from him), and he's got a spot on his left ear where the skin is rubbed off--can't tell if it's like frost bite, or if he was attaked by a different animal and the skin is sloughing off, he also seems skinny to me--If I remember right, when Quazi was this age, he still had a little bit of a belly (not fat, but you know, a little spot where you could feel that he had a belly, this cat doesn't have that). He keeps trying to come in the house (reminds me of Ivy when she found us), but he's not allowed in because he's still "someone's" right now.



Also, all these photos were taken with my Droid. The top two in low-light, and the bottom one in bright-light. The most annoying thing is the response from when I tell it to take a picture to when it actually does take the picture. you gotta have a VERY patient subject.

Mint

As discussed eons ago, I read the "It's your money or your life" book and started doing step 3...or whatever it was. And I honestly haven't done anything since. But, that's not the point. The point is that Shawn has been teasing me since about March that I use Open Office Spreadsheets to keep track of everything when I could just use the open source equivalent of Quicken to do the same thing, only better. I however found it cathartic to actually go through and type up everything at the end of the day. Then, instead of typing everything every day, I started only checking stuff on Sundays. And then it went to 2 times a month, until finally it was checking everything on the last day of the month when it just became a hassle to typing in everything just to get the end numbers so I could put it in my graph. The graph that shows how much I spent/earned over the month, how much is in my Roth account and how much I have in my account from which I make donations.

[aside] funny thing about the donations account. I started it so that during our combined charities drive at work, I could make donations and shawn couldn't complain because I'd budgeted to donate that money (basically counting it as money I've already spent so when I donate it, I don't actually use any money we need). However, since starting this account with ING, I haven't EVER transferred money out of it to donate and instead just donate directly from my paycheck. Which is how we ran into that overdrafting of my account debacle. [\aside]

At the beginning of the new year, Shawn decided to broach the subject of using an online tracker for our expenses instead. Now then, I don't trust the internet. When Shawn started using ING back in 2004, I only signed up for it so he could get the $10 "refer a friend" thing and then only kept like $50 in the account for a year. So basically until I was pretty sure that ING wasn't a scam that was going to take my money. Sadly, ING actually has better security protocols than a lot of banks. Shawn's new baby: Mint.com

When you sign up for Mint it asks for all the other log on information for your other accounts (bank, credit card, 401k, etc.) and then tallys up your net worth every time you sign in. Plus it has nifty features such as showing you where you spent the most money in the last month, proposes budgets for you, and you can set it up to text you whenever there's odd activity.

Now then, as I said, I don't trust the internet. So of course my biggest fear is that someone hacks into the servers at Mint.com and steals all of the money out of all our accounts (which I realize the irony since I do all of my banking online. But! if they hacked into the Wells Fargo servers, they could only take my Wells Fargo money, and my other money would be safe). Shawn tells me that this wouldn't happen because who would be stupid enough to steal a bunch of money out of one person's Mint account? Wouldn't it be smarter to either take a little bit out of everyone's accounts so that no one notices (how many people would notice a penny missing)? Or wouldn't it still be smarter to only take money out of accounts from the same bank? If you take all the money out of all the accounts, it's pretty obvious that it happened because of Mint, and it would get shut down; whereas if you only took money out of one brand of bank account, then it would look to be that specific bank's problem and it would take much longer for Mint to be shut down.

Yeah, sometimes he scares me too, people.

cable

We finally have cable (I say that like I've wanted cable, which I haven't). I have been watching animal cops all morning. That and gray kitten visited again, this time Quazi was outside. All I can think is that gray kitten keeps thinking "today is the day. Today is the day I will make a new friend. Oh shit, hiss, nope, not today. Maybe tomorrow."

Dipping the toe in...

We've taken the plunge and gotten ATT U-verse. Only took the poor man 4 hours to set it up (required him drilling holes through our walls). Half of the time he was outside. and it's only 25 degrees out today.

Ever have one of those days where you thought one thing but totally said something completely different? Yah, I did. I said,pretty much out of the blue: I am so funny. Yeah...while I may like to be funny, I'm usually not. Until I do something stupid. Sigh.

That Wench!

That wench on the radio lied to me. you know the one. the one that does traffic. This morning she told me that all the highways were slow, so I took Alternate Route 1. I did not need to do this and in fact wasted precious minutes because of it.

Speaking of radios...I love the clip they keep playing of Dick Clark. 20...19...18...17...16...15...14...12...10...11...10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...Happy New Year!

But hey, he still did much better than I. At least he was still awake.

Ringing in the New Year

So yes, sometimes my posts are boring, and there are only maybe 4 people in the world who read this blog. So, I figure I will show you just how old-fogey I can be.

Last night, that is, New Year's Eve, Shawn and I ate leftovers for dinner, watched a movie, fell asleep on the couch while watching the movie, and then, after waking up after the movie finished, I decided that it was time for bed. It was 10:00.

I was totally asleep, in my bed, when the new year started. And I don't even have kids waking me up at 4 in the morning to blame it on.