So Monday the 16th (yesterday) was the 8 year anniversary of our having lived in the Denver metro area. We like it a bunch, but we still miss friends and family from around the US (and world) – but it’s the longest amount of time Jessica’s ever lived in one place. The same can be said for Abby & Evie 
I lived in Nevada for longer, but I hardly count.
W8w.
Happy New Year! I can’t wait to see what 2012 holds. Its looking exciting and i’ve got a lot to learn. As you’d expect, i’ll do a bad job if keeping you posted
I replaced the door between my garage and back yard today. It was much easier replacing that door compared to the door I had replaced between the house and the garage. Probably because I had the experience of the first to make the second one more direct. I don’t love door replacements as a whole, but I learned a few things. The one thing I wanted to point out which may save some time and money: Many new doors have adjustable/replaceable weather stripping so that if you need to pull the weather stripping out of the crack they’re tucked into just about 1/16th of an inch – you can. If you pull it out that much to create a better seal you’ll have better energy efficiency AND not have spent $15.00 or more on new weather stripping. Pretty cool [or warm, depending on the season].
When what you read is:
Debt increase by presidents: Reagan 186%, Bush 54% Clinton 41% Bush II 72% Obama 23%. /source CBO [from Twitter].
Does your brain translate it to this:
It turns out those percentages don’t add up to the actual national debt value, so the numbers seem wrong. But when someone shows you percentages get out your spread sheet or calculator to make sure that you’re not being had. If you say that Obama has had less spent during his presidency or that Clinton was a spendthrift or any number of other things based on percentages you’re probably doing it wrong. And yes, this is showing billions and trillions [the formatting isn't quite right in the copy/paste].
Due to the compounding values of those debt numbers this massive expenditure of “only” 23% is rather ‘off’. Additionally Obama’s presidency is not over, so calling this one is a bit premature.
I say we call them all out for being fools with the financial resources. Additionally: congress(es) is (are) also responsible for this.
After 3 weeks of being on a road trip (during all of which I worked) we’re home. I’ve got plenty to share… later. It’s just that I’ve got more work to do than time, and more time than money, and more money than the impoverished people in parts of the world where I don’t live. I’m working on adjusting all of that as best as possible.
The girls are fine.
Jessica is fine (and beautiful).
The dogs are looking for discipline.
The weather is hotter than I’d prefer.
I’ll try to get back to this – eventually.
Today we flew EARLY from Denver to Atlanta to Newport News, Virginia where we drove to North Carolina. All in about 13 hours. To spend a week on the east coast with a family from church and another family that was from church, but then moved to North Carolina. But then they moved to Georgia! And so now we’re all from out of state. It is as far east as this Californian has ever been. Also as far as his TX and CO girls have been. His wife has been further east, but she jumped continents to do so. Do people in the far east think we’re far east, far west or far out?
When it is all said and done it will have taken us several months to actually change banks. We’re actually leaving our old bank to switch to a credit union. This is something that I like because firstly it’s a local financial institution, and secondly credit unions are much more service oriented in many cases because they have members who the employees are serving rather than some person that is not directly their ‘boss’. When I asked the employee at the credit union if I could do various things that my old bank wanted to penalize me (unnecessarily) for he simply said, “Yes, you can do that.” How about situation two? “Yes, you can do that, too.” Are there fees for this? Do I have to jump through this hoop? “No, there are no fees for that and we don’t own a hoop holder to put a hoop there for you to jump through.” [I made that last answer up, but he said the same thing in meaning, even if my imagination makes him more funny.]
The hardest part is the automatic withdrawals and direct deposits. Those seem to take weeks and up to months to get swapped over. And they want voided checks. And they warn you not to close down your old account until (insert some date/time here). Seriously: in the age of computers and databases are we that slow that what takes me seconds to enter into an online form takes weeks and months to process?
The Credit Union is not officially supported by Mint [and they are not presently working on supporting it], but I’m OK with that. I will likely pay for and install You Need A Budget and use that with regular downloads of our data. There are downsides to changing institutions like re-entering online billpay accounts. But those are minor in comparison to being nickel and dimes and treated like a money tree that needs regular pruning.
I look forward to being a member of a local credit union with staff that treat me like a human being.
The blogs on this site are all being merged into this one blog. Everything’s being moved here. All of it. I’m wedding the blogs. It’s a royal pain in the posterior.
Thus: this is the other royal wedding.
At least that’s what they tell me. If you tell someone something enough times your job as a communicator will either get infinitely easier because they’ll finally get it. Or it’ll get much, much harder because the repetition causes the pith helmets and ear plugs to be put into place. I tell my daughters, “Think before you act,” about a bazillion times a month. I’m pretty sure they think it’s some mantra that my parents told me. It isn’t. My dad told me, “it is your mother and I’s responsibility to raise you to be an adult when you’re 18.” That worked out pretty well because I was a kid who was just looking for a place, a time, and a thing to be scared about. At 17 and 365 days I was scared of 18 because it meat adulthood.
I hope that my children one day learn to think before they act. I suspect it’ll be a lesson they learn throughout their lives. I also hope that when they turn 17 and 365 days they don’t panic like I did – because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it is that I have more than one thing to learn.
So Harry Reid has decided that prostitution is bad for Nevada (I think it’s terrible for marriages). And Obama thinks that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. If consenting adults… wait, you don’t suspect that these senators (one former, of course) are being inconsistent, do you? Nah, that’s impossible.