Monthly Archives: September 2013

Old school Sunday…

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This week’s posts from ye olde MySpace blog come to you from April 2008. All things considered it must have been a pretty average slice of life. By that I mean I wasn’t ranting and raving about anything in particular – although I should point out that there was a fun little piece about the ridiculous complaints we were hearing on the news way back the. Think stock market, gas prices, etc.

Every Sunday I see the number of posts waiting in the queue dropping and I’m almost a little sad that these Sunday posts will be coming to an end sooner rather than later. We’re under 10,000 words in the unpublished archive as of this morning. It looks like we’re down to another 12 weeks of these Sunday posts before I’m going to need to come up with something new and interesting to say on Sunday mornings. There look like enough posts to carry Sunday’s through the end of the year at this point. After that, the field of topics will again be wide open. I guess the new year is as good a time as any to kick of in a new direction.

Until we burn that bridge, I hope you’ll continue to enjoy old school Sunday.

For the cure…

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It’s Saturday. I was finishing up the mad dash around southern Cecil County that included trying to get get gas, get to the bank, stop at the vet for bulldog meds, get what’s probably the last of the summer fruit from the roadside stand, stop at Petco for dog food, hit Walmart for people food, and then get back to the house before noon. I’m a man with a plan… and a schedule. Usually that schedule runs like a well built Swiss watch and it would have today, too, if the picture postcard town of North East hadn’t been overrun by people wandering in and out of traffic on the one street in and out of town. With every minute that these asswagons plod around, I have frozen stuff turning into thawed stuff… and that doesn’t make me a particularly happy traveler.

With every car length I inched down Main Street, my usually sunny disposition degenerated further into a seething rage. I mean here I am trying to be productive and get shit done and there’s a town full of people wandering around like they don’t have a single thing to do or a care in the world. People like that make me crazy, or maybe I should say they make me more crazy than the run of the mill people you can’t avoid on a daily basis.

After ten minutes of swearing a blue streak at everyone who had the audacity to cut between me and the car whose bumper I was riding, I felt vaguely bad about driving past the Race for the Cure “finish line” set up at the far end of town. I’m sure all of these people are perfectly nice and they’re trying to do a good thing, but it seems to me that they could have managed to plan a route somewhere that didn’t tie up traffic coming into and out of town in every possible direction. Today I got to see a whole lot of people with a whole lot of heart, but there’s not a jack one of them that knows a damned thing about logistics or route planning. Clearly, I’ve gotten past the part of the day where I felt bad yelling at them.

Landlording ain’t for wimps…

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Everyone assumes that when you have rental property you’re making money. That hasn’t exactly been my overall experience, but I accept that it’s the general perception of how things work. Most of the time, the cash flow from the condo in St. Mary’s offsets the giant sucking sound that is the negative cash flow coming out of Memphis. Between the two, I come fairly close to breaking even more months than I don’t. Of course then we have the occasional singularity in which both the condo and the house are sitting vacant at the same time.

That moment you realize it’s about to happen is probably one of the few times in life you’re ever going to seriously consider becoming an arsonist as a valid career option. When you go from happily paying rent and breaking even on everything else to sucking wind on rent plus two mortgages, let’s just say that all the fantastic financial management lessons you’ve learned from Suze Ormond or Dave Ramsey go right the hell out the window. The only thing that matters at that point is how fast you can bring cash in the front door and how fast you can shovel it out the back. It’s not so much a case of planning as it is an exercise in crisis management and triage.

Fortunately, the two leases almost never expire at the same time, but when they do you’d better believe that you’re about to get a serious lesson in why landlording ain’t for wimps.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Drivers who think they can, but really can’t. Look, I like speed. I have the tickets and warnings to prove it. Generally I feel as safe with my own driving at 85 as I do at 25. Sadly, I can’t say I have the same level of confidence in everyone else on the road… especially the wannabe rice racer who cut the turn just a little to wide this morning and earned himself some first hand experience in how understeering is every bit as bad as oversteering . He should probably be allowed to get some kind of refund from his driving instructor. On the other hand, I have now personally seen the look of abject horror someone in a Honda Civic gets on their face when they find themselves unexpectedly traveling in the wrong lane with a Tundra bearing down on them. Hopefully he didn’t spend too long in the ditch, because that’s where he was headed when I rounded the next turn and rolled on with my morning commute.

2. Breaking my own rules. I think we all know that I hate speakerphones in an open-bay office setting. It really serves no purpose other than ratcheting up the noise level in a room that already has the acoustics of a train station. I was forced into a position of breaking my own rules today by participating in part of a call using a speakerphone in a “wide open” room. I was mortified, but it happened so fast that I couldn’t stop it. I have no other excuses. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

3. Too much of a bad thing. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I don’t think I’ve ever attended a meeting that I didn’t want to escape from within five minutes of it starting. Sadly, my opinion doesn’t seem to carry much weight when such decisions are made. Which is how you end up with so many meetings scheduled between now and the end of the month that the “September Meeting to Discuss Issue X” has to be moved into October. You might think that means the “October Meeting to Discuss Issue X” would get cancelled. You would be wrong, because what it really means is that we should just go ahead and have two “Meetings to Discuss Issue X” in October. So as soon as the ten pre-meeting meetings for the October “September Meeting” are finished, we get to immediately start on pre-meetings for the October “October Meeting.” Clearly common sense, logic, and reason have no place here.

Rent me…

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One of the really problematic bits of no career being able to keep my attention for more than two or three years is the resulting tendency towards collecting former addresses. As part of my collection, two of these addresses are more than just memories since I’m still nominally responsible for their care, maintenance, and upkeep. I wish I could tell you that being a small time land baron is a profitable endeavor, but as anyone who’s ever done it will probably confirm, most years you’re lucky if you break even.

Which is what leads to posts like this one…

You see, I’m currently in the position of having an unoccupied one bedroom, one bath condo available for rent in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. It’s a 800 square foot, ground level walkout unit featuring a wide covered patio area and a walk in closet/pantry for all you extra storage needs. Your $850 monthly rent includes water, sewer, and trash pick up. With an additional deposit, this unit is both cat and dog friendly.

Centrally located in the Wildewood community, this condo offers easy access to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Solomons Island, Leonardtown and all the natural beauty of St. Mary’s County. Our Nation’s capital is within reach if you’re a power commuter. You’re within walking distance of groceries and a less than five minute drive from BJs, Target, and other shopping amenities. Better still, you’ll have ready access to the exciting southern Maryland nightlight offered at the Brass Rail, the Green Door, and Solomons’ historic Tiki Bar.

This opportunity won’t last forever, so act now before it passed you by and someone else is living the life you want in the condo you deserve.

No surer way…

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There’s no surer way to convince me to do something than to tell me I can’t. That’s why I take Maryland’s new gun laws set to go into effect on October 1st a personal affront and challenge. The modern sporting rifle (a.k.a. Assault Rifle; a.k.a. Evil Black Gun; a.k.a. Military Style Rifle), isn’t something I would have picked up for my own collection. I’m not a rifle guy for the most part. I’ve probably put more rounds through an old beat up tube-fed .22 than I have any combination of the other rifles I’ve ever had my hands on. Then the governor and state legislature of MD_CompliantMaryland did something stupid. They told me and every other law abiding gun owner in the state that we shouldn’t be allowed to have these “scary” looking rifles because someone, somewhere might use them for devious purposes. The same thing could be said of kitchen knives, of course. I mean does anyone really “need” that big, scary looking butcher knife or meat cleaver? Just think of all the needless kitchen related injuries we could prevent if we were only allowed to buy paring knives. Sigh. I’m exhausted from making hundreds of variations of that argument every time someone asks why I insist on exercising my Second Amendment rights.

The fact is, I would have lived out my life and been perfectly happy with an old bolt action rifle if my state’s governor wasn’t dead set on telling me what I should or shouldn’t want or be able to own. We arm NATO countries. We arm the Iraqis. We arm the Egyptians. We arm the Afghanis. We arm the Syrians. Hell, within my own lifetime we even armed the Iranians. We send guns to Mexico that are turned on our own. But when it comes to allowing Americans to arm themselves against threats to our life, liberty, and property, well, that’s a bridge too far.

I don’t understand a world where that makes sense. And that’s why as soon as some official in Washington or Annapolis says I shouldn’t want something, I feel the compulsion to run out and start hoarding it. I’m not sure I can put a finger on the last law passed in either place that didn’t result in more taxes out of my pocket or being allowed to enjoy fewer personal liberties. Until that trend reverses course, exercising all your rights at every possible opportunity just makes good sense.

Maybe that day will never come. If it doesn’t, at least I’ll be able to say I’ve done my small part.

Molon labe.

Resource constrained…

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Everything in life more or less comes down to a competition between wants, needs, and the resources to make those things reality. Needs are fairly basic – those things we must have to sustain life. Wants are more problematic in that the more we have, the more we tend to want. Resources, of course, are very nearly always constrained in one way or another. Having spent six days sitting at home over the previous month and a half when I would have otherwise been working, the constraints are a little tighter now than usual. That’s a shame, because we’re ramping up to that time of year when the wants start following an upward trend. Put another way, it’s the time of year when Apple starts rolling out it’s new mobile toys.

Over the next two months, the boys and girls in Cupertino are set to roll out new versions of the iPhone, iPad, and several varieties of actual computers. Given that I’m currently limping along with a 2008 model MacBookPro, upgrading that really should be my first priority. Of all the machines in the house, it’s the real workhorse and takes the lion’s share of abuse in blogging and general writing. Now that the battery issue is resolved, my iPhone is working well enough and could easily last another year in service. The iPad mini gets its share of daily use, too, but basic web browsing doesn’t exactly tax its considerable abilities. It really should be the last thing I’m looking at replacing right now.

When it comes to new toys, of course, logic and service life remaining don’t exactly play a role in my analysis. It’s almost a mortal lock that I’ll be up in the wee hours of a morning soon after September 10th ordering a new phone on its first day of availability. If I have to make a case for needing a new one, I can always fall back on the fact that the old, standard 8GB of mobile storage isn’t what it use to be. Which is both true and sad all at the same time. I’m a little more hesitant about replacing the iPad at this point. If there isn’t a true retina screen built into the mini this time around, I think I can justify waiting for the next generation in my own mind. Without some exceptional change, a two year replacement on tablets almost feels reasonable. As far as getting over the hump and bringing a new laptop into the family, well, it’s probably going to remain in the easy to justify but unlikely to happen column this time around.

Funny how I can justify a new phone every year in my own mind, but not a laptop unless there is literally smoke poring out of the back of it. Stupid resource constraints always forcing me into the fun decision instead of the responsible one.

A few extra…

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This Sunday’s archive posts were a little light on content and a little long on lack of sleep if I don’t miss my mark. These were all from the week or two immediately after Winston joined the family, so puppy patrol was the order of the day and the blog definitely suffered as a result. Since I’m a good guy, I’ve added a few extra posts to the usual Sunday Five this week. Hopefully you’ll consider volume a sufficient substitute for lack of depth this week.

Posts from March and April 2008 are up and available for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy this week’s no-strings-attached trip down memory lane.