Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Randoms

Couple of things I've been thinking about...

Sunday after Easter lunch at Geoff's parents, Geoff drove me by the school where he plays basketball on Monday nights. We saw a house for sale in the neighborhood and he pulled over and asked me to get the little flyer so we could see how much houses in that neighborhood cost. Then he kept pulling over to every house he saw... once we cleaned that neighorhood out of flyers, he went to a neighborhood nearby to look there... and that basically turned into a whole tour of neighborhoods. It was actually pretty fun, a lot of those neighborhoods I didn't even know existed. We ended up in the "country" which is about 10 minutes north of where we live. All of these beautiful properties with 1 - 10 acres each. Of course those homes are all $600K - $1.4M. It's fun to dream though! Yesterday I was browsing Craigslist home listings (which I do probably twice a week anyway) and searched for that neighborhood... well a $215K home popped up. I figured it was probably using that neighborhood as a key word but wasn't IN that neighborhood... but it was! Problem is it's very close to Hwy 26, which is a major freeway (connects Portland to the coast - it is PACKED on sunny nice weekends!). That's good and bad... it's nice for freeway access but not nice for freeway noise. We drove past it anyway after work... we actually loved the property! It is .45 acres, which is a good size for us. It would let us do some of the things we want to do (have a shop, park our RV on our property, have a hot tub, have a garden, entertain outdoors, etc.) without having a giant space to maintain. The house was built in the 40's and I'm quite sure isn't in the greatest condition, considering all of the pictures are of the property itself and NONE of the inside. I think the idea is that you'd buy the house for the property and either do massive renovations to the home or else tear it down and rebuild. Geoff says it's "teeny tiny" but really it's almost 1600 square feet which isn't bad at all (it is smaller than our current house but very reasonable I think). A nice property and a nice price, but it just isn't the right time! Such is life. :) Other properties will come along.

When you get a bonus, do you ever "allocate" it to multiple things? Like, oh, I got $100, I can go out to a really nice dinner. Then a week later "gosh I need some new jeans and a couple of new sweaters... oh, remember I just got that $100, perfect!" Then you find out your insurance doesn't cover the full cost of the procedure you just had at the doctor and you owe another $150, and you think "oh well that's good timing with this bonus". I have caught myself starting to do that before I realized "hello dummy you already planned on doing X with your bonus" (X is usually saving it...), you can't be trying to spend it on other things. If I really did that I'd use my bonuses 5 times over I think!

This morning on the radio I heard a commercial for getting 20,000 bonus miles when you apply for a new Alaska Airlines credit card. That's nothing special, all of the airline credit cards give you that pretty much all the time. I use my Costco Amex for 95% of my purchases. The only exception is when a place won't take Amex and I have to use a Visa, then I use my United College Plus Visa (I pay no annual fee but only get a mile for every $2 I spend instead of every $1). Actually I don't know why that's relevant... anyway, a couple of years ago American Airlines was having their 25th anniversary and they were doing all of these special things. One day they had a promo where if you got their credit card you got like 25,000 miles and two free companion tickets, plus no annual fee and whatever else. I thought "THERE is a deal I can get behind" and applied for the card. A few weeks later I got a note saying that they couldn't give me the card because they "couldn't verify my home phone number". Well that's because I have no home phone you fools. Oh well. No big deal. But now Geoff and I both get letters from American Airlines at least once a month asking us to get their credit card. I TRIED people, you wouldn't give it to me, remember? Now stop sending me mail.

I got my roster for softball today! So I guess we're "official". Unfortunately, that's ALL I got - a list of names and phone numbers. I emailed the guy back and I'm waiting on information like is their a coaches meeting? What about emergency forms and waivers and things like that. When do I start practice? He gave me a list of fields I could use that are in "various states of repair" and said I could use them as I find space... well that's just sketchy! So we'll see what happens with that... yikes. I hate a lack of organization! I'm sure it will work out, and that's fine, but I'm not going to just start calling parents and saying "well I got your name... how about we set up a caravan of our cars on Thursday at 5:30 PM and drive around until we find an empty field... and I'll just have you sign your name on a piece of paper for a medical release form... yeah...." No, that won't work. I'll just wait on more information. :)

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