Fuck You, Reflection Of Myself!

Posted by on December 18, 2018 No comments

There’s been a recent raft of shit going on at work lately.  When I say shit, I mean literal shit, but I don’t mean there’s a literal raft involved.  This shit affects me, and a couple of my co-workers, but it isn’t a co-worker’s shit.  It’s simply a matter of mistaken identity and unwarranted aggression from an idiot doing idiotic things.  Fucking bird.

It’s a stupid female cardinal that must have a nest of stupid cardinal babies in a nest in a tree above our cars.  And at various times times during the day, this helicopter mom, this smotherfucker, swoops down to our cars because it sees itself in our rear view mirrors.  It then proceeds to flap around and attack its reflection in the mirror.  I’m not sure if the shitting part is because the bird thinks it won or because it thinks it’s losing the fight, but our cars all have bird shit on the doors from the fight.  I can see marks on my window from the feathers flapping furiously in a highly-alliterative sentence.

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I’ve even been in the car during the attacks.  I’m just chilling out, using my new Android phone, which has been a big pile of meh, and I’ll see bitch bird flapping and pecking around at the car beside me, or sometimes it comes to my car.  Bitch bird stands on the door’s window sill and makes a big fuss over the other bird in the door mirror.  It makes me wonder about about the canary I had as a little kid.  Was it cruel to put a mirror in the cage and laugh when the bird pecked at it?  I was told that birds liked to look at themselves.  This stupid bird sure doesn’t.

So, to keep my car door from getting shat all over, I started covering up my mirror with a cleaning rag.  That seemed to work except the bitch went over to the passenger side to fight. So I need two cleaning rags.

Where Are The Dine-ins?

Posted by on December 18, 2018 No comments

It was a couple months ago that a Sonny’s BBQ restaurant near my workplace abruptly closed with no warning.

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I later found out they closed another location in a neighboring town.  While this affected me for my lunchtime meals, I still had my local Sonny’s I could visit.  My local restaurant was recently remodeled, whereas this one that closed did not remodel.

Maybe a month ago, I was driving and I saw that a Pizza Hut restaurant that I would visit had closed.  Later investigation showed that it had moved to a new location.  I called their number and found out they were delivery/carryout only now.  No more dine-in.

This week, since that hut had closed, I went to my other Pizza Hut location.  I was shocked to find that it was closed as well.  As I kept driving, wondering what to do, I caught a brand new Pizza Hut sign in the plaza just down the road.  I pulled in to check it out.  No surprises, no dine-in.

The other night, I’m driving home and I see a brand new sign in a plaza near my house – Pizza Hut.  This signals to me that the dine-in Pizza Hut just down the road is also closing in short order.  Now, I don’t eat at that one because unlike the other two I visited, this one doesn’t have a salad bar.

So that’s three Pizza Huts in my immediate area (immediate meaning within 30 mins; my travel range is greater than most people’s) have closed their dine-in facilities in favor of delivery/carryout only locations.  It makes me wonder what the future holds.  Restaurants are generally very sensitive to the economy and supposedly the economy is doing awesome right now.  But is it?  Why are places closing or downsizing?

Changes

Posted by on December 8, 2018 No comments

Last week, I started the process of relocating my stuff from the bedroom that had served as my office into the lanai which would serve as my new office.  It was a surprisingly difficult effort.  What should have taken a couple of hours or so took many days.  But, although surprising to me, it’s also consistent with some recent difficulties I’ve had in regards to motivation and exhaustion.

On one particular day, after moving a couple of pieces and giving up, I reflected on the moving process.  Why was it so difficult?  There was a time in my youth that I would rearrange my living area nearly monthly.  I loved the different possibilities and the change it brought.  Now it just seemed I wanted things to stay the same.  That’s kind of depressing to think about, which is ironic because it’s depression that’s been holding me back from everything lately.

Without dwelling on that point, this is more about changes.  On a smaller scale, I have to deal with the moving of my stuff between rooms, which will require putting some things into temporary storage.  On a bigger scale, the GF is going through the same thing by moving her stuff to my house, which has to be even more overwhelming and disheartening considering how many things of hers will need to be stored.  And overarching all of this now is our near-term plans to move to another state.

So, for whatever stress I might be feeling about moving my shit in my house, it’s nothing compared to what needs done to move to another place.  First and most importantly, it reprioritizes the improvements that need done to the house in order to maximize resale value.  Some things just can’t be done in time and some may be too expensive to get return on the cost.  But, it’s a real kick in the ass to start doing something.  I always work best on a deadline.

The big move eclipses the small move and the sacrifices become acceptable and even encouraging.  I’m packing up all my music gear, not because I don’t have space for it in my new office but instead because we’re moving out.  It’s not losing out on anything, it’s preparation.  I shouldn’t feel constrained by my new office because I’m not going to be there for very long.  And there’s going to be a period of time where things are going to be even more cramped until we find the ideal house in our new city.

And while moving rooms was stressful to me and I was wondering why that was the case when I used to love change. moving cities is quickly becoming an exciting prospect, despite the looming effort that remains in this house.  I think it might because I’ve found a “why.”  Why am I doing all this stuff to the house, what does it matter?  Well, right now it matters greatly to the future owner of the house.  And at the same time, I’m going to shed anything I might regret doing in this house and the GF and I will start with a clean slate, on equal footing in a new place.

Gone Girl

Posted by on December 6, 2018 No comments

I was waiting in line to check out and the people behind the counter were talking obliviously.  You know, some people just don’t realize they’re talking in public.  I wasn’t really paying any attention to them until I heard, “Yeah, they found her body out back.”  And I, and probably anyone else that would have heard that, understood that we are talking about someone who died.

On my way out of the store, I started thinking about how curious our language is and how we say things that have a very specific meaning.  Also, that those things we say have a deeper philosophical meaning.  She said, “they found her body”, not “they found her”.  It’s a statement that says your body is a part of you or belongs to you, but it is not you.  It’s like “they found her shoes out back”, but no one would ever say, “I got halfway to work and realized I forgot my body.  Mondays, right?”

When we talk about people, we are usually unintentionally talking about their soul or spirit.  Statements like “Is he still with us?” or “No, he’s gone” are usually not talking about the physical aspect of a person.  And I sort of find that weird that this concept is accepted among the faithful and the not.  Even among the most atheist, there’s still a believe that when you’re dead, you are apart from your body.  I would guess that even if they don’t believe in an afterlife or a spirit, they can’t just erase that person from their memory, so in a sense, that person does live on, at least in their mind.

And although it’s a little contrived, this language lends support to the concept that you are not your body.  Your physical appearance isn’t what defines you.  People that believe in auras and astral bodies would wholeheartedly agree with that.

What Happened?

Posted by on December 3, 2018 No comments

Um, hi again.

It’s been a little bit since I’ve posted anything here.  Things kind of went weird for me a while ago.  I’m not really into exposing a lot of myself online, but I’ll summarize my radio silence as collateral damage from the combination of worry of my health, sadness of current events, and fear about work performance.  It’s been an eye-opening experience in the sense that I understand some things now that I could not understand before.

I have a small backlog of drafts that I wrote during the time I did not feel like “talking” to anyone, so I can have a little content to wrap up 2018.  I can say that 2019 is going to be a very interesting year.  Maybe it’s premature for me to make any claims of success on a few good days in a row, but optimism has to be better than where I’m coming from.

Wish Fulfillment

Posted by on September 17, 2018 No comments

Within about the last year or so, Carrabbas has become something of an obsession of mine.  Well, both me and the GF, but I have the opportunity to obsess more.  And somewhere around a year ago, Carrabbas started being open for lunch.  And that’s when the obsession intensified.

I have a great liking for soup.  It’s probably from growing up in the north, where hot liquid is a treat in its own right, but flavorful hot liquid is even more so.  Carrabbas chicken soup is pretty much at the top of my list, and two of their three available salads are favorites of mine, too.  While I can and do eat their spaghetti on occasion, I can get by with just soup and salad.

Over the last year or so, I have been getting by on just soup and salad.  But here’s the problem.  If you order the “soup and salad” entrée, you get a cup of soup and a half salad.  No way is that enough for me.  So, over time, I’ve settled into getting a bowl of soup and a side salad.  This is filling (usually), but the price is rather heavy as well.

Because of my continued financial discipline to log all my receipts, I am able to accurately identify how frequently I visit Carrabbas and how much I spend there.  If I have lunch there, I spend $19.02.  That’s a pretty expensive lunch.  I have wanted to try and cut back on that cost, but that soup!  In the past, I’d considered trying Olive Garden for their endless soup, salad and breadsticks lunch, but I don’t like any of their soups.  And now, after eating Carrabbas so much, I can barely stomach OG’s food anymore.  It’s like someone put their food into Photoshop and went overboard.  It’s an oversaturated representation of what food should taste like.

So, Olive Garden was not an option.  And I continued spending $20 a lunch usually once a week for myself at work, then the GF and I would eat there for lunch together again on Sundays.  Here’s a kicker: Carrabbas has a rewards program where you get up to $20 back on your 4th visit.  But a visit only counts if you spend $20 or more.  So, my single lunches at $19.02 (after tip) aren’t counting to that reward.

I distinctly remember commenting to the GF, “Can you imagine if Carrabbas had an endless soup and salad option?”  I dismissed the possibility, because their chicken soup was so rich, they couldn’t afford to make it endless.  But, here in September 2018, it has happened.  An endless soup and salad lunch special for $8.  I may never eat lunch anywhere else again.

How incredible is this for me?  First, I can have as much chicken soup as I want.  They bring it out in cups, but there’s always more for the asking.  In fact, this is much better because the soup is always hot, instead of having a bowl go cold as you work on your salad.  And also, I like two of their salads.  Before, I was tied to only having one.  Now I can get one of each and enjoy them for their differences.  Finally, that price!  That’s almost half of what I was paying before, and I get more food than before.  And, if the GF and I want to eat there for lunch and just do soup and salad, we’ll break the minimum for the rewards.

I’m singing the praises of this new promotion and secretly already dreading the day it is retired.  I’m not sure if it’s my age or the current consumer environment that makes me think of contingency plans as soon as something new enters my orbit.  Aside from the fear of not having this deal available anymore, the only other negative to the lunch is that it takes a long time for me to get filled up.  I have always eaten slowly, and as I get older, it’s getting worse.  My lunch today was longer than normal.  I sloshed myself out the restaurant door and made it back to my desk in 90 minutes.  I have so much liquid in me, I’ve probably altered my natural buoyancy.

One final observation.  I don’t know what communication network old people use, but the lunch special announcement made it to them early.  I used to eat lunch at my Carrabbas nearly alone every time.  Now, the place is flooded with old people.  They say that old people are good for two things: finding good food and finding good deals. 

I’m an old person.

Hooking Up With A Previous Love

Posted by on September 16, 2018 No comments

A recurring story on my blog is my relationship troubles with iced tea.  Maybe it deserves its own tag at this point.  To quickly recap, I had a very long relationship with Nestea mix, but it changed, so we had to break up.  I rebounded with Publix mix before settling down with Lipton, who was very good to me for a long time.  Then one day, Nestea completely disappeared and while that was a little upsetting, I found Te Bustelo, which made me dump Lipton immediately. Man, that makes me sound like a horrible person.

As in other relationships, the fickle one gets their due, and Te Bustelo ended production, leaving me a widower.  I had purchased a case of the mix – the last available – to get me through the next couple of years.  Well, it’s been almost three years now and I’m down to probably a few last servings in my last container.  I was probably avoiding the looming reality by not attempting to find a replacement.  Still mourning, maybe?  Today, I finally sucked it up and decided to find out what my options are.  Off to Amazon, source of everything.

Searching for iced tea mix, I got results dominated by Lipton, with a few other brands scattered here and there.  One of those brands was Nestea (trying to avoid eye contact).  You know, maybe I wasn’t completely with my head in the sand about my future tea product because at one point I did consider buying unsweetened tea mix and adding my own sugar.  And you know, Nestea does make an unsweetened mix…

This is what Nestea looks like today, the same it’s looked for many, many years.

Nestea Sweet Mix Iced Tea, 45.1 oz

As I’m working through the results, I see this.

Nestea Sweet Iced Tea Lemon Mix 90.3 Oz

Whoa, what is that?  That is a different package with a different logo.  And another thing – I am extremely sensitive to names, because of my trauma from “sugar sweetened tea mix” morphing to “sweet tea mix”.  This canister says “sweet iced tea mix”.  That is different.  That must mean it is different.  I click the link and look at the ingredient list on the package.

Sugar, Citric Acid, Instant Tea, Maltodextrin, Tricalcium Phosphate (prevents caking), Natural Lemon Flavor

Oh my god.  This mix changes out Sucralose with Tricalcium Phosphate, in the same way Sweet Tea Mix changed Fructose with Sucralose.  If I haven’t used the word enough yet, let me try some more.  Sucralose is why I had to stop drinking Nestea in the first place. It’s an artificial sweetener that hurts my stomach. Suckralose.

I actually couldn’t handle this revelation at the time, bordering between excitement and disbelief, so I return to my search results.  I scroll a little further down and I see this.

Nestea Original Canadian Lemon Iced Tea Mix Jumbo Can 2.2kg 122 Servings Imported from Canada

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, HERE?  I click this item and look at its ingredient list.

Sugar, Citric Acid, Instant Tea, Natural Flavour, Silicon Dioxide

This mix, I read, is the Canadian version of Nestea, named “Original Lemon Iced Tea”.  A second Nestea mix with no sucralose.  Where the hell has this stuff been for all these years? (Canada, apparently.)  And while I have no regrets over my special time with Te Bustelo, maybe it’s a sign that I should get back, even if it’s with the exotic, foreign cousin of my original love.

Still reeling a little from this sudden discovery, I make a fairly dumb decision to buy both of these items right away.  They’re not exactly cheap, since one is a giant container and the other is a giant container imported from a foreign country.  So, $60 in tea will be at my house on Tuesday so I can then see if there is still a spark between us.

Hope springs eternal.

From The New To The Old

Posted by on September 7, 2018 No comments

Looking back, the last couple of years has been actually a pretty big upheaval in my media consumption world.  Starting it off, on Black Thursday in 2016, I got televisions.  For ages, I had an old tube TV I never watched.  And that was interesting for a while.  I never did much with it.

A few months later after getting these TVs, I got a game system – a Wii.  Snicker all you want, but it was, and occasionally still is, fun.  If nothing else, it gave the TV a reason to exist.  A few months after that, I bought a couple of Roku sticks, which I plugged into the TV, giving the TV more reason to exist.  Finally, this year, I implemented the Plex server on my network, so I can stream music to the Rokus that are on the TVs.  And all this time, I’ve had a old home theater system with a 5-disc DVD changer and VCR, with 5.1 speakers.

Despite having all this possibility, things are kind of a mess.  The biggest problem is the sound system.  If I watch the Roku or listen to Plex through the Roku, I can only get sound through the TV speakers.  If I watch a DVD, I have to mute the TV speakers because it doubles the HT 5.1 system.  If I play the Wii, I have to turn on the HT system and mute the TV.

The root problem is that the TV needs to be the center hub of all video and audio and the audio from the TV needs to be routed to the HT system.  Because the HT system is downstream from the TV, if the HT system is serving audio and video back to the TV, it will short circuit the audio path and playback will perform as expected.

So, evaluating my options, I have two older components that need integrated with a newer component.  In this case, the TV will be the hub for audio and video, but the Wii and the HT system are only analog.  This affects the signal path in two places.  I only have one analog input to my TV, so either the Wii or the HT system will have to have the signal converted from component (RCA) to HDMI.  Then, the only audio output from the TV is digital optical, so I need another conversion from optical (SPDIF) to RCA.  Upconverting one direction and downconverting the other.  Ridiculous.

Finally, I’m not entirely sure the digital output from the TV will be unmixed, meaning that if I turn the TV speakers off, or mute them or turn down the volume, will the digital signal still be sent or will it be muted?

The optimistic end result is that audio from all sources: Roku/Plex, Wii, and DVD will all go through the HT speaker system’s Aux input.  When a DVD is played, the HT system will still play through the speakers and when the DVD is not played, it should return to Aux.  Maybe I’ll have to change the input on the HT remote.

Fortunately, the converters aren’t very expensive, less than $15 each.  Here’s to hoping it all works…

Two Wrongs Making A Right

Posted by on September 7, 2018 No comments

I read a lot of financial articles and I find it interesting there are a lot of “confessional” types of posts, like “I did this and this was the result” or “What I learned when this happened”.  I’m gonna write me one of them post types now.

Usually the author wants to admit a dumb thing they did or reinforce common knowledge on a best practice.  I don’t think my story really qualifies for that.  Mine is more of a “don’t be afraid” story.  A couple of wrong things were done, but in the end, it’s going to work out.  Could it have worked out better?  If the circumstances were different, sure, but that’s the point exactly, I did what I had to do to make this happen.

This story is all about my house and its financing.  On one level, that’s kind of personal information, but on the other hand, being able to share some real-world numbers will add authenticity to the story and can provide a benchmark for others to compare to, for better or worse.  If you’re doing better or much better than me, bravo.  I’m perfectly fine where I’m at and I’m not going to let a thousand finance articles make me feel bad because I didn’t do it better.

What triggered the decision for this post is the realization that I have less than 10 payments on my 401k loan left – I’ll be done with it at the end of this year.  Finance geniuses, go ahead and begin cursing me already.  401k loans are the devil and evil and should never exist and I’m a fool for even taking one out.

Why did I take out that loan?  I used it to pay off my second mortgage.  When I originally bought the house, we took out 80/20 loans to avoid PMI.  More cursing, yeah, yeah.  But, by paying off the second mortgage, I reduced the interest I was paying by over 2% and also reduced the term, and also avoided a balloon payment at the end of the term.  I will take responsibility for not realizing there was a balloon payment on the second mortgage – go ahead and take your shots on that one.

Aside from the benefits of lowering the interest and term, there was another critical reason for eliminating the second mortgage, refinancing.  At the time this was happening, I was divorced, but the house was in both our names.  I was making all the payments, so my ex was getting free equity out of the deal.  Around that time as well, the real estate market was cratered and HARP was available to refinance those who were underwater.  I attempted the HARP route, but my second mortgage made me ineligible.  So, there wasn’t any refinance option while that second mortgage was still in play.

After the second mortgage was paid off, my 401k loan payments were about $40 more than my old second mortgage payment.  It would still be two more years before I could get an agreement from the ex on buying the house out completely.  During that time, I was saving up other money for the buyout and as you would expect, keeping current on my primary mortgage.

When it was time to settle on my buyout, the refinance was greatly simplified because I didn’t have the second mortgage.  Additionally, at the time, interest rates were abut as low as they would get.  I was able to get a 15-year mortgage with a payment even lower than what I was paying previously.  Again, it was an interest drop over 2% and lopped 5 years off my term.  By simply paying the same amount I was already paying, that will also take an extra year off the term from the extra principal payments.

It’s been 2 years since I did the refinance and it’s kind of amazing to think there’s only 13 years left, 12 with the extra payments.

Another Brick In The Closet

Posted by on September 6, 2018 No comments

Last year, before the holidays, I found a nice, massive keyboard sitting unloved at a thrift store.  I assume it was still sitting there because anyone that tested it would have found it to be broken.  I, however, am foolish enough to buy things without any consideration of functionality.  So I brought this keyboard home, discovered it was broken, and proceeded to fix it up enough to make it work.  And it’s been sitting in my closet ever since, waiting for its moment of glory.

On this most recent holiday, I saw something else at a thrift shop – a nice, tiny keyboard.  The price was right, so I bought it – untested as is my way.  As soon as I got the device to the car, I realized it was broken.  One of the controller knobs was completely snapped off.  Oh well.  The price was right.  Let’s get it home and see if it even powers up and makes noise.

I got it home and it powered up and made no sound.  Well, it made a buzzing sound, sometimes.  I started doing some online research and learned that this particular synth has a well known issue with that control knob failing (not sure if being broken off is considered “failing”).  So replacements are generally easy to get.  At this point, I don’t even know if that’s the actual problem.  But let’s take a step back and look at this thing.

This little bugger is the Alesis Micron, which is an analog modeling synthesizer.  It originally sold for $400 back in 2004.  It still sells for about $200 on the used market.  I got it for $7.50, half-off the original $15 price.  So you see, it was worth the gamble.  I’ve spent far more on far less (which should be my life’s motto). 

When I saw “analog modeling synthesizer” on it, I got really excited.  The only synth of that type I’d really known about before dropping out of the music scene was the Nord Modular, which I remember being a 4-figure keyboard.  These types of keyboards emulate the older synths of the 70s and 80s. and they typically do it very well.  They also have a lot of the features of older synths like arpeggiators (for playing Who Are You) and vocoders (for playing Mr. Blue Sky).  There is a video on Youtube of someone playing Mr. Mister’s Kyrie live and solo on the Micron. But before I can have that kind of fun, this device needs repair.

I have a couple of options.  I can just replace the knob (a potentiometer, if you want to sound cool), which requires some soldering work.  The part costs less than $2 (plus shipping), and of course, I’ll need a new knob button to cap it off.  Yeah, that’s one option, or I can buy a whole new control board with knob for $40.  That’s the plug and play option and the one I opted for.  That and the cap were about $50, so if this works out, I will have a really neat new synth for a little under $60.  And then, it can sit in my closet, too.  How stupid.

It is dumb, but I have a lot of fun rescuing junk and making it (or trying to make it) usable.  I should consider myself fortunate this desire is just for musical equipment and not, say, cats.

The parts are currently being shipping and I should have them next week.  Let’s hope I have as much success with this little Alesis as I did with the huge Alesis.