The Cat's Nuts

Car sale is proving to be difficult...

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:31:53 -0500

I had around 5-6 people come and look at my car this weekend. The result was a little upsetting. I had three offers on the day, two at $7k and one at $6.5k. I almost laughed at the guy that offered me the $6.5k, because that's a whopping $3,500 below blue book. The other offers that I had were at $7k, which, while it's not much better than the $6.5k, it's closer. I think if they had offered me $7.5k, I would have gone through with it.

This morning, on my flight out to work, I ran into one of the directors. He let me know that I was selected to work on a project in Charlotte after I get off of my current project. Turns out that Charlotte is only 240 miles from Atlanta, so looks like I'm going to be driving up there. As it stands, I should be driving the 540i....don't know how I feel about that. Gas isn't that bad on the highway, so it shouldn't be hurting me all that much, and I figure that for a month, this is how it will work out:

480 miles/wk = 1920 miles.
1920 miles / 22mpg = 87.27 gallons of fuel
87.27 gallons * $4.50 (pesimistic) = $392.71 in fuel
1920 miles * $0.585 (IRS Rate) = $1123.20 Pay from Company
Net "Income" = $730ish

So if I were to go about driving for the six weeks of the project, I should pull in around $1100ish that i could dump into my car. "Repairs" and depreciation won't hurt the car, as it's already got 108k miles on it.

I've been really digging into the forums this past week and have made myself a solid budget. I looked at June's spending and it was a little....okay....a lot sad. I spent clost to $1,000....on nothing. We're not talking food and stuff like that. I'm talking about tangible objects that i could have easily gone without. Oh well. This month will be better.

Time for some changes...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:05:48 -0500

There comes a time in your life when you step back, you look at what you have done with your time and you come to some realizations. This past week, I did just that and found out some pretty disturbing things. I think that I should start off by saying that I have been brainwashed. It’s true.
A few weeks ago, I was driving home from work, flipping through the AM dial (I know…I am a dork…I admit it….I was actually looking for NPR) and stopped at 640AM in Atlanta. On the radio, there was this guy, screaming at someone about how they were paying a “stupid tax”. I was entertained and the advice he was spewing made sense. So for the next week or so, on my ride home from work I tuned in to listen to his spiel. Granted, he throws in bible verses, but referes to the “new age version”….which is slang for translating verses into modern speak …an example “He that co-signs a loan is an idiot”. Luckily, even with my lack of tolerance for religion, I can handle the occasional reference to the Proverbs.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to more of his stuff, reading what I can and generally learning about his process for creating “financial peace”. The jist of the whole program is to eliminate debt, build a 6 month safety fund, fund large expenses (college fund), and pay down house. At first, it was shocking to hear that I “shouldn’t” be borrowing money to buy a car, and I shouldn’t have a single credit card, even to “build credit”.
So after listening to all this stuff, thinking about how I have been spending my money, I decided to take a look at my student loans and see how I was doing with them, so that’s what I did. It turns out that I’ve been paying on student loans for the past 3 years and have paid out $9k. That’s a good bit of money…then I did the calculation out to figure out how much I had actually paid off…$2k. yep, I paid Sallie Mae 7k for the right to have borrowed their money. My heart sank a bit when I saw that. Seeing as how I hate to waste money, I’ve come to some conclusions about how I am going to run my life and my personal finances, and I’ve put together a plan.
This weekend, my Bimmer is being sold. Luckily for me, I had gotten in a slight, and I mean slight, fender bender with a woman that decided to cross five lanes of traffic. The damage to my car was estimated to be $1700, and to a BMW, that means it was literally a small dent and a scratch. Insurance paid me out the money, and now I’ve got the car up for sale. Hopefully, after this weekend, I’ll be able to pay off my grandmother the balance that I owe her. I’ll use the rest of the money that I have left over and buy a nice little Honda Civic beater-mobile and rock that for the next 2-3 years. I figure that if I budget correctly, I can pay down the $45k in student loans that I currently have in the next 3 years. To do that, I’m going to have to pay out around $1300 a month to student loans. It’ll be miserable, but without a car payment and with the new pay increase that I got a few months back, this is something that can be done.
At this point, I would typically write “we’ll see”, but not this time. This is the plan, and I fully intend to stick to it. Wish me luck.

Moving into the summer months...

Thu, 29 May 2008 18:09:07 -0500

Once again, life has come in the way of my proper blogging schedule. That, and a new puppy, and getting settled in the new house AND starting to travel. Damn it’s been busy. Last weekend Melissa and I finally finished our furniture shopping. We rounded out the endeavor with a fabulous Bassett bedroom set which we lovingly refinished this past weekend…well, painted it anyway. Hopefully it’ll all look simply wonderful when it’s in place, but I didn’t get to see it in its full glory as I had to fly out on Tuesday morning.

The puppy, Dagny, has been wonderful. She’s a sweetheart and doesn’t have many of the bad puppy traits that I can’t stand. In the three weeks that we’ve had her, she has only wet in the house 3 times and twice were in the same day (on Melissa’s watch ;) ). It’ll be really exciting to watch her grow up into a good dog that we know she’s going to be….damn I sound like a proud parent.

This weekend, my parents have finally decided to make the trip down to the wonderful South. They are driving down the two cats to come and live with me again, so that’s pretty exciting. They cats have been living up at my parents house for the past year and a half, so to finally have them back will be nice. Hopefully Seven will stop his random pissing habit that he’s developed since he moved to my parents house, but we’ll have to wait and see. Worst case scenario, I’ll just have to limit him to the laundry room. In preparation for the cats, this past weekend Melissa and I got two bird feeders and hung those in the yard. We also did a bunch of yard work to spruce it up a bit, got out-door patio furniture and cleaned up the yard. The front lawn needs a good mowing, but hell, there’s only so much time in the weekend. That’s definitely one of the draw backs about traveling on the weekends.

My parents should arrive tonight around 10:00, and tomorrow morning we’re going to drive out to 6 Flags for a work function that I have to attend. Tickets were free, so it’ll be a good time I’m sure. If nothing else, it’s something to do for the day to get us outside. Don’t really have many other plans other than showing my parents around the city. I’m sure that I can find some things around the house where my father can provide some input, but my guess is that there is going to be a lot of wine and beer drinking, lots of dog talk/play and probably more good food than we should eat, all of which I am looking forward to.

Work has been going well. I’ve been working on a Hyperion project, flying out half way across the country ever week, which, as you can imagine, isn’t the greatest thing. Granted, I am able to save some money, but that’s not really any consolation when I have a puppy and a girlfriend at home that are both needing my attention. We’ll see how long this travel thing lasts. I figure that in a few weeks, I’ll talk to my boss in Atlanta about finding an Atlanta based project. On the slightly brighter side, at least I’ll be able to build up some hotel and flight miles.

I still have my car. Had a little fender bender with it, which wasn’t my fault, so I’ve gotta get it repaired which is a pain in the butt. Insurance paid me $1200 to get it repaired, and I have a feeling that the body shop that I bring it to will come to a higher number, so I’ve gotta go and get that taken care of, but I don’t think it’ll happen this weekend. Perhaps next weekend I can bring it up to Marietta, where I found a garage, and have an estimate done.

The new pooch...

Sun, 18 May 2008 09:30:53 -0500

With the realization that I am going to be traveling, and the fact that Melissa would be home at the house, alone, we decided that it would be the "ideal" time to get a dog. While there isn't really an "ideal" time, now seemed like it was the best that we were going to find, so off we went. We've been scouring petfinder.org for the past few months, looking at all the cute little puppies and generally there were lots of ooooos and ahhhs, but nothing that really struck us to the core. Then we found her.

Her name was "Athena", and she had the most soulful eyes. She's really really beautiful. Last weekend, Melissa and I drove out to Athens and visited with her foster mother outside of a pet store. She was romping around with her other litter mates, all playing in the pen outside the store. When we scooped her up and tested her temperament, she passed with flying colors, letting out no whelps, not biting and not trying to get away like a crazy pup. It was perfect.

So that day we brought her home with us, converted the dining room into a make shift dog area and thus it has been for the past week.

I am happy to report that she has only messed in the house on two occassions, both of which were minor wet spots, both on hard surfaces, so that's been amazing. Much better than I could have hoped for. She's getting much better about sleeping through the night, but we do have to bring her out at least once in the middle of the night, so that's rather irritating, but that'll stop once she gets a little older. Right now we have her crate in the bedroom, so she can see if we're awake and that's usually when she starts to whine. The first night we had her, she went out to the bathroom around 4-5 times. THAT was miserable, but like I said, it's getting much better. She's very much a morning dog, so around 7:30am she decides that it's time to get up. I'm just happy that we have a back yard where she can go and play and we don't have to pay much attention to her during those early morning hours.

The house is coming along nicely. We just got a dishwasher installed, as the original one that came with the house wasn't working worth a damn, so it's nice to have a working dishwasher. We're working on putting together a picture wall of friends and family, so that's going well too, just taking some time. We need to sift through some photos and figure out what we're going to blow up to put in some of the frames.

This week I am again flying out of town for work, and frankly, I'm not really looking forward to it. I need to get into an exercise routine again like I did when I was traveling down to Atlanta, so that's the one bright spot. Speaking of which, I gotta get going and get a haircut because I'm looking like a shaggy dog.

Pictures are fun...

Sun, 04 May 2008 23:25:35 -0500

View image

Freaking dumb people.

That's it...I've gone and pissed off the karma gods...

Sun, 04 May 2008 15:34:44 -0500

I think that the only explination that I have for my recent run of bad luck is that I've done something that really pissed off the karma gods. That's really the only way to explain it.

Yesterday, Melissa and I went out to get some breakfast and then picked up some bedrails. On the way home from the thrift store where we made these purchases, I had an "incident". It was a 4 lane road, two lanes on either side and I was in a 5th lane, which was a right hand turn only. I was slowing down as the turn was only 50 yards or so away and I had bed rails in my Bimmer. Well, what I didn't see was a young black girl in a Buick Park Avenue crossing 4 of the 5 lanes of traffic. She continued into my lane, without even so much as looking to see if anyone was coming, as she really couldn't see anyway. I ended up slamming my brakes in order to avoid hitting the Buick that was now completely blocking my lane. My car skidded and I rammed the side of her car at around 3-4mph, crumpling in her door, but not doing much else.

Now, I've been joking about getting into a car accident as my efforts to sell my car have been less than stellar and it turns out I'll be losing a good bit of money if I do go and sell my car. Well, this accident, because of the severity of it, isn't going to total my car...not even close. So I get to go through the hassel of having her insurance company try to pay for it and getting all that done with. As if that weren't enough, she was on the phone with a lawyer while at the accident scene, so I wouldn't be shocked if she tried to sue me for something stupid. She argued with the cop and told him that I was speeding, that's why I couldn't stop, and she was politely informed that it didn't matter if I was doing 90, she wasn't supposed to cross into my lane. She didn't care and sped off, so now I get to wait until the police report comes out so that I can file a claim against her insurance company. Pain in the butt really, but what else are you going to do? Hopefully the accident will allow me to get my electrical system issues under control, as now my car alarm goes off when no one is around and for apparently no reason....worse than before.

On top of all this lovely stuff, the house is taking forever to get put together. Mostly because Melissa and I don't have enough furniture to really stock the house, but more for the fact that we're still painting stuff, and that's takeing a bunch of time. I can't wait for the house to finally be done so that my weekends aren't spent doing this stuff.

This coming week...hell...tomorrow, I am going to be in Duluth on a project which is billable, so that's awesome, and after that I'm going to be flying out west for the next 9 weeks. Melissa isn't all that pleased about it, but it should afford me the ability to have her come out and visit and take some trips to places that I normally wouldn't splurge to go to. Speaking of which, I should probably start to book my flights for that sort of stuff.

In a few minutes, Melissa and I are going out to go and buy a lawnmower and get a desk for her. It'll be nice to get out of the house for a little bit. I think that I should go and shower as I smell like a three day old dead monkey in a bag.

Ahhhh...settled.

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:35:11 -0500

Okay, it's been 15 days since my last posting and things have finally calmed down a bit. Melissa and I are finally all settled into the new house, and that's going well. We got the keys on the 15th and did whatever work we wanted to do on the kitchen and bathrooms (there is still stuff to do) and overall we're really pleased with how everything came out. The kitchen looks amazing....1000x better than it used to. The bathroom is a huge improvement, but we still have some caulking to do, so that's on the plate. Melissa's mother has been staying with us this past weekend, but she left today so things should settle down even more.

I've not really gotten into what prompted out move, because well...I've been damn busy. Melissa and I were planning on taking the month of May to move out of the apartment. Nice and slow and at an easy pace. Instead, we crammed it all into a single weekend, didn't pack correctly and overall did a rush job. I'm going to write up a whole post dedicated to talking about that a little later on, but needless to say, it butted up nicely to my post of "if I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

I still have my car. I've gotten some hits on it, but nothing of real note except Bob. I've explained to Bob all of the things that have been done to the car and all the little nit-picky problems (well...not ALL of them...) and he's still interested. Rick and I have been working on the car a bunch recently trying to get it all set up and working and most importantly, turn off the damn check engine light. That thing has been driving me crazy. After really messing around with it, I think we're come to the conclusion that the light is on because of the the leak at the rear main seal. The leak is allowing air into the engine and bam....CEL comes on. Anyway...Bob knows this, I dropped my price to $9k, a $1700 loss from what I paid 5 months ago, but hell...I want a manual anyway, right? I have a hard time dealing with it, but I figure that's the price that we pay for buying cheaper cars. My next ride isn't going to have 100k miles on it, that's for damn sure.

With any luck, I'll have this car sold by the end of the week. Speaking of which, I am flying out west to do some Hyperion training. I FINALLY start on a project on the 12th of this month. The project is not in Atlanta, so I will have to travel some, but it's not really all that big a deal. I won't be working with OBIEE, I'l be working with Hyperion, so my skillset will expand a little bit there which makes me happy. Another thing to put on the ol' resume. I fly out for training on Thursday morning and back on Friday evening, so it should be a nice little jaunt. Nothing too crazy.

I've been getting more and more work to do while I am sitting on the bench, so that's been okay, but a little boring, as most of the work that's being done is "busy" work. Oh well, I'll be into some substantiative stuff fairly soon, so that'll be better. Anyway, I'm going to go and tend to that.

If I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:49:48 -0500

The past two weeks have been a lesson in patience for me, as bad luck has been coming at me from all sides. Let's first start off with my car.

I've decided that instead of tracking down all the small issues that are causing the Christmas tree lights to go off on my dash, it's time to just bail on this 1997 POS. I've currently got a check engine light that goes on, an air bag light that started to go on randomly (turns off when I make a hard right), the radio sometimes shuts off for no reason...like totally goes dead...sometimes while still playing music (which I then can't turn off), the sun roof broke yesterday, my car alarm goes off randomly and without cause....should I go on? It's not just one little thing, it's everything. So I posted up the car. Now, I paid close to $11k for this thing....I have it posted for $9.5k....and I've driven it a whopping 4k miles. So...the return on investment is looking poor. If that weren't bad enough, I've gotten a single solitary email, which the guy didn't respond when I wrote him back. Oh, and the car started to shake at 50mph (stops at 60), and sometimes doesn't start as cleanly as it should....shuddering and feeling like it's going to stall unless I stomp the gas.

Anyway, so that's my car issue. I'm going to be taking a solid 2k hit by the end, I know it. Ugh. Oh well, I just want that thing out of my life so that I can get something more reliable. Lesson learned there, that's for sure.

Yesterday, I went to pick up my new Soyo 24" Monitor from the office. I had purchased it from OfficeMax online and had it shipped to my house. I was quite excited, and quickly set it up once I got home. Now, I'm not one to chastise UPS, as I know their job is miserable and yadda-yadda-yadda, but the box was so beaten up that I took pictures of it before I opened it. It looked like someone put it on the floor of the warehouse and kicked it to the truck. Really quite bad. I opened it up, hoping that everything would work, and the monitor itself looked fine, and I was really hoping it would work. Upon plugging it in, the screen flashed to life, filling the 24" screen with color and glamour, and then it died. No reason....nothing. Just a black screen. The blue LED on the frond turned to red and that was it. I figured it might be some issue with my video card, so I plugged it into a laptop....same thing.

So off I went to a regional OfficeMax store to return the messed up monitor. I was pleasantly surprised with the service at the local OfficeMax. They took my boxed up monitor and grabbed me a new one off the shelf. Didn't even open the box.

When I got home, I opened up the box, and it was perfect. No marks, no scratches, nothing. I plug in the monitor, DVI of course, and all seems well. It looks great. It's basking the room in a cool blue glow. I was very very pleased. Then I saw it. A single line of pixels about 4cm from the bottom of the screen.....all black. I pushed and pulled at the connector, at the sides of the monitor, changed the ports, even changed to a ...gasp...vga cable, and nothing. Monitor has a dead line of pixels. So I'm going to have to bring that back to OfficeMax today or tomorrow. Just another thing to do.

On a positive note, Melissa and I are going to be getting the keys to the house tonight, so that's really exciting. We'll finally be able to start the move in process, start to paint and start to get ourselves situated. It'll be quite nice, but I half way expect that something is going to go terribly wrong, as, like I mentioned before, I've not been having the best of luck.

Anyway, we'll see.

Bad Photographer...BAD.

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:46:46 -0500

Normally, whenever I really get on myself, it's usually about writing in my blog. This time, it's more about photography. Ever since I moved out of NYC, I've pretty much stopped taking pictures. Why? I dunno. I just stopped. I used to have at least a new set of photos once a week. Stuff to play with and really for no other reason than to take pictures. Well, I need to get back into it. Melissa and I are soon going to be moving into the new house, and we're going to need some photography to adorn the walls, and well...it's going to be my job.

I think that I'm up for the task, so today, in celebration (no, not really) of this decision, I went to OfficeMax and purchased a 24" LCD Monitor. I've had the same 17" LCD since 2003, and I figured that it was just time to move onto something a little bigger. Ideally, I would have liked to get the 30" from Dell, but I just couldn't justify spending $1500 or more on a monitor, when I got this 24" for $300. Hell, I could get a 3 display setup of 24" monitors for considerably less than I would pay for the Dell. Hopefully it'll arrive by the weekend, but I doubt it.

Yesterday, I FINALLY sent out my damn Jui-Jitsu cancelation letter and infromation. it's been months, and they owe me around $600, but I doubt that I'll actually see that money. I may have to just bring them to small claims court. Who knows. I gotta see what they say first.

Tonight, Melissa an I are heading over to GeorgiaTech to go to a presentation about their MBA program. Apparently, they have an evening program for working professionals. While that wouldn't really work for me currently, as I wouldn't be able to attend classes if I were traveling, I may be interested in looking into taking a one year rapid paced degree. We'll see if that's really even an option. That presentation is from 6:00-7:30 this evening. I figure that I'll bring my camera and start my 2nd coming as a photographer there.

I posted my BMW on Autotrader last week, and still haven't gotten a reply. I figure it's going to take a little while to sell that car. Hmm..that's not fun. I took some pictures of it this weekend, but I've not gotten to update the ad as of yet, so I think that I'll get on that this evening.

I think it may be time to head home for the day.

Informatica or Bust...

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:55:15 -0500

This past week was hell. I sat through 4 days of training in Informatica. If you don't know what that is, then be happy, because your life can easily be complete and fulfilled without ever having to know it exists, but if you do know what it is, then you'll understand my disdain for it. Although the training was well presented, there's no way to get around the fact that the material is really quite dry and there's really no way to make ETL processess very interesting.

On Friday night, Mellissa and I headed out to the pottery studio and experienced the first annual chili cook off. There were a whopping three contestants, but it was still a good time. Other than that, our weekend was pretty relaxing. Hung out, watched some movies, started to watch the Showtime series Dexter, etc. Just your lazy weekend. The weather in Atlanta has been particularly miserable for the past week or so, and it's not looking like it's going to let up any time this week. It's possible that tomorrow is going to be nicer than it's been, but then there are cloudy skies predicted for the remainder of the week. Blek!

Last Tuesday, I posted my Bimmer on Craiglist, Autotrader and the Bimmerforums.com to give it a shot and try to sell off the beast. As of this morning, which marks a week of it being posted online, I've gotten exactly zero calls. Apparently, with gas prices approaching $4 a gallon, the desire to own an 8 cyl. automobile has wanned considerably. We'll see how it goes. I may end up just having to keep it and deal with it's quirky little issues, but that's really not something that I want to do. I purchased the most expensive plan with Autotrader, so a least I can run it until it sells for as long as I need to. I'm not all that worried, as I posted the car for $1000 below KBB value...so SOMEONE should think it's a good deal, becaue frankly, it is.

This week, I am working to finish up my presentation for the Lunch and Learn that I'm presenting on BI. It's going well, and I should have a fairly viable presentation in a day or so. I'm looking forward to hosting and presenting the lunch and learn, as it'll be a good time to practice my public speaking, as I've not done a whole lot of it in the past.

Anyway, speaking of which, I should get working on that.

A tribute to Mythbusters....

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:38:23 -0500

Brian Greene....I'm sorry.

Anyway...back to work. Today I may get to do some cold calling....Ooooooo....

Yuck. Soliciting services.

More Pottery Stuff

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:27:18 -0500

More stuff the Melissa and I made....

Oh, and yes, this is my 300th blog entry. Whoo hoo.

So tired of politics...

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:18:38 -0500

November isn't anywhere even close to being here, and already, I'm tired of the politics surrounding this race. If I hear the people on the radio, or read one more blog post about Obama using his "race" to his advantage or some dumb ass republican saying that it benefits him to be black, I am going to shit myself. I mean really...come on people. Think about what you are saying. Does he get more media because of it, yes, probably, but in the larger scale of being elected into office, does it really help? I don't think so. I can't imagine that it would, or we would have had a black president by now.

The other issue that's gotten me a little uptight is the financial situation in our country. I mean, it's getting back. I just got a letter from the IRS letting me know that I was going to be getting a tax credit...well, everyone that makes under 75K on their 2007 Taxes gets a $600 credit. You know the country is in a bad place when they spend billions of dollars handing out money to it's citizens. I can only imagine how people are going to spend this money. If I had a guess, it's not going to be to pay off credit cards. There will probably be a surge in PS3 sales, car rims, plasma TV's and that sort of supurfluous nonsense. Ugh. Don't get me wrong, I think it will help to stimulate the economy, but still, it's a sign of bad times. Have you read anything about what's going on with Bear Stearns? Sold....for $236 million....yes...million. How does a company like BS go out of business and be sold for $2 a share? Perhaps it's because we have a vacation happy President that's not running this country and a power hungry VP that's more interested in his own personal gain than he is in the welfare of the country. Anyway...enough ranting on politics. It just gets me angry.

Speaking of the IRS...it's tax season. I tried to do my taxes online with HR Block, but because I moved to GA mid-year while keeping the same job, it confused the tax software, so I'm going to have to go into their offices to have it done. Perhaps I should just find a good accountant so he can get it done and done professionally, instead of going through some two-bit HR Block "Tax Specialist"....probably not. Bit more than I need to get involved in.

This past week, Melissa and I were successful in our search for a house to rent. We found a great 3BR/1.5bath house for rent right in Decatur. I'm so tired of Buckhead it's killing me, so it'll be nice to get out there and be closer to midtown, pottery and better non-commercial shops and restaurants.

Anyway, it's about time to start work for the day, so off I go.

Funny kitten....

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:28:07 -0500

Sometimes I just get a kick out of things like this...had to share.

Pottery is going well...

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:07:26 -0500

Okay, I said that I would, so here are some pictures of what Melissa and I have made at Pottery recently.

Pretty fun eh?