Spondulicks Forever!

Discarding the junk is literally uncovering items intended for my personal growth and well-being. Found a novena for employment, Steve Pavlina's book _Personal Development for Smart People_, a book for Attention Deficit Disorder strategies, two stamps for sending first-class letters to Canada.

I also found my receipt for June roofing, which I'll use with my HELOC statement to claim the home improvement interest expense on taxes.

It's like spiritual direction, this cleaning.

DS might not like it, but I'm going to get him clothes for Christmas so I can knock off some of the replacement items. I don't have to be the "fun" parent 100% of the time, just the caring and supportive one.

Two months -- must spend carefully!
I have ten days to use this year's Chinook Book coupons.

The VISA account spirals upward. I sliced 25% off the balance today.

Precious metals at a 10% discount from last month.

My natural gas bill usage was 22% lower than it was at this time last year, with the same temperature.

Hubby's videocard on his laptop is dead, so he bought himself a new motherboard. I am okay with this -- it beats buying a new laptop, and most of the money he used came from his PayPal account.

Schadenfreude update - of the twelve properties I'm tracking, only ten of them have mortgage debt to property value ratios lower than the US average of 69.8%. They were purchased between 1999 and 2000, and although they had refinances and home equity lines of credit, the cash-outs were minimal, under 0.5% of the amount lent.


I don't know, doubt actually, that the $60 VEHICLE (I am not calling it a car -- I know this is going to include scooters and motorcycles) tab initiative will pass. Yet while listening to the talk radio discussion about the proposed measure, I pondered aloud what I can do to save $5/month.

Cascadia - land by the Cascade Mountains.
Discardia - cutesy-wootsy name for my participation in the Nine-Day 27-Item Boogie Fling, that latter name trademarked/copyright by

FlyLady. Now I'm no sugar-sucking, maggot-breeding drosophila suzukii: the FLY stands for "Finally Loving Yourself."

I am taking a cue from creditcardfree and throwing out stuff. I have way too much paper -- the eco-terrorists are better off setting fire to my place instead of some university's Horticultural library, I sure hope they pick a January day to do it if I can't clean this stuff up.

I have discarded pieces of paper from floors, mostly. Receipts, expired coupons, library return-date slips.

dig my masterful way of taming paper!

Today's Discard of note: Two giant tubes of Banana Boat Sunblock for Kids, SPFs 30 and 50. Why are giant tubes of sunblock even available in Cascadia? Do they think that we all go to Hawaii or Arizona in winter and stay long enough to use them up?

Keep watching the posts tagged "Baby It's Culled Outside" (there's a reason I'm not invited to be a guest blogger here).

$143 in chequing account now, because spouse filled up the gas tank. Not saying it wasn't due, eleven out of twelve gallons were replenished, but we could have made do with $15 worth of gas instead of $41 worth.

So today, as the roast was not completely thawed, we had Pantry Night Challenge. A southwest-us style cold bean/corn/red pepper/lime salad; lukewarm soba noodles with some homemade dressing; apple-walnut kale. And enough of everything for either leftovers or making more.

out of: lime juice, tamari sauce.
makes me sad to run out of things when the account balance is low.

I wish the lads were more into zucchini frittatas, because I could have made that! Later in the week I make 'em eat kasha and potatoes.

DS did some literal budget cuts: I reused a print-on-one-side sheet of paper for a monthly budget, and the boy chopped it up with scissors to get pics of "Trailer Park Boys" and Hugh Dennis from "Mock the Week."

$211 in chequing until Friday, $11 in my pocket. No eggs in refrigerator.

Considering doubling boy's current savings account, and transferring half the interest into our account. He's getting 6.17%.

Wrote my first press release. Have more communications things to distribute, plus a list of local online media to mail and fax said press release. Wonder if I can ask the candidate to cover fax expenses or if I can fax via my computer. (Can't fax from printer.)

At least though I have my cash reserves. Which means I can stop my liquid savings, reduce debt and accumulate winter comforts and replacement items.

--Paulette the laundry tamer and iconoclastic procrastinator
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one of these days I'm going to make a page on the formatting keystrokes we can't use on these Blogs. Like quotation marks in the Entry Title field, and arrows using less-than key and hyphens.

So the time I allotted for worrying has officially arrived: the market value for my house has nosedived.

I ate too much sugar last night woke up in the middle of the night and despite counting down several times by seven from 1498 and entreaties to my invisible friend, who is now downgraded to imaginary friend because I go by "a friend in need is a friend in deed" I was awake for four hours. That friend was probably looking over some Kansas City reverend's shoulder at some verboten computer images. Because that's more rewarding than dealing with a soul in pain.

My computer is on the fritz. This is a pity because I made PNG files showing the major contributors of the school board director incumbent's 2007 campaign, who live in another city and would not send their children to public school let alone public school in this city, are also the ones who gave heaps to defeat Initiative 1098, an initiative for an excise income tax on state residents earning more than $400,000/year. The father of our wealthiest citizen was FOR Initiative 1098, the man the wealthiest citizen left in charge of his company was not for the initiative. The latter man funded the incumbent.

I'm supposed to be doing a walkaround blitz in my legislative district. That'll be fun with no sleep.
I am very sour on US politics now. My councilmember running for Attorney General, my state representative, my state senator are not going to get $ from me. "No, you chose to endorse someone who wasted money our schools desperately need. I am assuming you knew what this man did for 3.5 years before you endorsed him. Nobody told me in Immigrant Class that voters are supposed to elect people who misappropriate their funds and sit on big financial scandals without telling their fellow elected representatives. Why don't you put that in your campaign materials if American voters are so okay with that."

My husband took a deserved break from us this weekend, taking the scooter out to the peninsula to Neah Bay and Port Angeles. All that was fine but he didn't have to tell me how much he enjoyed it.

Meanwhile I am trying to get my kid to write poems as directed by his teacher for weekend homework. He is defaulting to Dorothy Parker variations: "if I had an AK-47" "if I had a howitzer". I am attempting to show him Wendy Cope (UK light verse poet) poems about English weather and football so his teacher'll be impressed. How hard can it be to write a poem?

1. Think of a subject, topic or image. Like weather.
2. Brainstorm/word association. Preferably adjectives and nouns.
3. Use senses: touch, taste, sight, sound, smell.
4. Find words that rhyme.
5. Identify and use a meter scheme.
6. Put some truth in it.

Here are my images, for example, of Seattle Rain:
* Odin's stale gym sweat
* The inside of my eyelids
* colour of a prison door
* damp cold teabag

Example rhyme of truth:
This June I had to wear a sweater
July by leaps and bounds was better
...October is cold with mist
November we make plans to spend
The best part of December pissed.

To his credit he did manage a poem about the National Hockey League teams.

Halloween candy at Cash'n'Carry. Regular size peanut butter cups for 50 cents each. Trick-or-treaters think they've got something special with a full-size candy. Plus family-size chips, unsalted butter.

Husband is out of town tonight so boy and I are living it up. I have some Koji Yamamura short films to watch,

$94.03 after a $5 coupon at a supermarket. Half of that was one full Coho salmon cut up into four-ounce portions. I also bought some discontinued white wine from the bargain shelf. Everything else was vegetables and items for baking cookies.

I am worrying about my short-term memory. It is blitzed. It has relocated to "Whattawa, Zontario." I don't even have alcohol or drug use or medication to blame for it. Today I went to a library I thought would have my book club selection -- this is the second time the online catalogue claimed it was available but turned out not to be so. Then I thought I'd visit another branch on my way home, but I stupidly neglected to WRITE the address down, instead I went by memory and veered everywhere like a trapped buzzing fly to get to the library. Then I had, on my list, to visit the supermarket but I pull up to a third library, after getting my book from the second. In the parking lot I thought "Uh I shouldn't be here. In fact I wonder if I am in a condition to drive."

I couldn't remember the name of Thomas Love Peacock's short Romantic Era rip of his friends ("Nightmare Abbey" I kept thinking "Crochet Castle" and "Northanger Abbey") nor the name of the Indo-Canadian author who wrote A Fine Balance, I was thinking Raj Viswanathan, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and not at all about Rohinton Mistry.

I wonder if I need a heavy metal detox, or a nootropics concoction. At least I went with a WRITTEN LIST and a PLANNED MENU for the week to the supermarket, with a coupon. At least that.

$10 to Sacred Heart Shelter for homeless women
$10 to St. Martin de Porres shelter for homeless women

It's World Homeless Day or World Mental Illness Day or something: I gave $10 to each. I also gave $10 to a food bank earlier, and now that I know our PTSA banks at a credit union, I renewed membership so $25 there for a couple membership.

I need a monthly challenge: maybe learning to distinguish wants from needs.

Found neat coffee place en route to curling: it's a church-run coffeehouse, with Stumptown roast beans. It's a hit with the small one because of the games, puzzles and music; it's a hit with the spouse because he and a barista both ride their wives' motorbikes to work.

Made 39 butter tarts for DS's class to commemorate October birthdays: apparently there were other birthday children but they didn't contribute anything. My son devised a Canada trivia quiz heavy on hockey content [mother rolls eyes--they come up five and three!] to which few including the teacher could come up with an answer. Thus I had eleven left over by the end of the class, and five left by the time I left the school, as other students took them. To their credit, they asked.

Philanthropy for reals: Yesterday Starbucks stores and kiosks in our county handed out $10 gift cards good for funding

DonorsChoose.org school projects. My son's school is a "high poverty" one, and I saw five projects yesterday for which our school teachers requested funding. The art supplies request was funded within hours probably because it was the first project mentioned in the PTSA e-mail and because everyone's child takes art, therefore it's immediate bang-for-the-buck; the special education middle schoolers and preschoolers, especially the latter, are still looking for funding. We funded the special ed projects, because there's never enough one can do for special ed.

We took two $10 cards, as there was supposedly a limit of one card per donor. Then I found that two females took about a dozen cards between them to fund projects. The end justifies the means, I guess. We also visited the Scholastic Book Fair and donated $19.68 worth of books and taxes to our son's class.

Today I give $10 to the local food bank.
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Server outage: Now I am wondering if SavingAdvice.com shares server space with Bank of America.

I will say this for Bank of America: it doesn't send us stupid mailers like "Open an account with $10000 and we'll give you a $150 bonus!" because everyone who hasn't banked with Chase has ten thousand smackers kicking around, right? "Oh I could go to a credit union I guess, but why not take out all the money in my mattress right now and head to JP Morgan Chase? It's obviously a successful company with integrity!"

And everyone who banks with Citibank has $4500 extra in their wallet or hidden in some home safe waiting for the now present moment when Citibank ratchets its fee-free checking account minimums to $6000.

This is why I don't bank with banks: I simply do not have the clairvoyance that bank account holders are expected to have: I'm supposed to know in advance how much to save and when to put it into an account to avoid fees when new terms and conditions kick in. Sorry, not gifted in that department.

HELOC: $15764.14
Mortgage: $118675.67

I have been reviewing our debt group diary and nine months ago I thought I was going to have $10888.23 paid off, from $138488.77, by the end of the year. I'm at $134439.81. If I hadn't missed one mortgage payment (interstitial) and taken $3500 out for the roof, I'd be on track.

I paid for three weeks' curling lessons for my child and enrolled him this morning. Say what you like: there were three other children sharing dual citizenship status taking lessons along with him.

Also Tuesday night is supposed to be heavy wind and rain with possible power outages, so I bought from Value Village (secondhand store) a coat for the boy, and went to JC Penney to pay for some waterproof winter boots.

I went to Big John's Pacific Food Importer to get prepared tart tins for butter tarts (class birthday celebration on Friday), we splurged on malt balls, roasted red peppers, 1 lb. prosciutto, butter, Walker's shortbread mini chocolate chip cookies. It is hard to not go nuts at Big John's PFI.

Then to Whole Foods for mussels (on sale at 25% off -- don't think I'm one of those who spends all her food dollars at Whole Foods because it happened to be across the street from a stop my son and I made), white wine for cooking -- ideal! 200ml for $3.00, lemongrass. Damp or windy grey weather makes me hunger for shellfish. I used a recipe from The Expo 86 Cookbook, which I bought for $1 the week before. Now I can add Nanaimo Bars to my Buttercup inventory as the cookbook author was the first to make them commercially available in Vancouver. I do know Nanaimo Bars are popular down here.

Nanaimo Bars -- triple layer bars. Bottom: walnuts, coconut; middle: custard; top: cocoa powder, sugar, coffee.

Tonight it is Flying Squirrel pizza (pizza for foodies), and Peaks Frozen Custard for Simply Maple custard. Because apparently after curling, and playing Vancouver 2010 Winter Sports Olympics on the Wii, and going to Vancouver to watch Canucks hockey practice, my kid has not had a sufficiently Canadian birthday. He also lost a tooth tonight, so the Tooth Fairy flew past customs and gave him a loonie, eh?

Oh yeah my laptop keyboard has stuck keys. I am getting by on another keyboard in a USB port, and access to my son's Linux computer. Hubby has already ordered a new keyboard.

Also, I might be losing my mind here, but sometimes I enter my bedroom to find the sunlamp over my bed on, with no memory of turning it on. Cats aren't that smart to be able to turn on lamps by pushing buttons with their paws, are they?

The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts,
All on a summer's day;
The Knave of Hearts
He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.
The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts,
And beat the knave full sore;
The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts,
And vowed he'd steal no more.

I witnessed, Guide's Honour, the following exchange in my house.

"There are three fewer butter tarts! WHO TOOK THEM? WAS IT YOU?" Knave points to King.
King, smiling, looks down at Knave. "Oh I didn't have three butter tarts... I had SIX!"

Knave throws himself at King, pummeling him with flying fists. "You SON of a PICKLE!"
Then he pushes King out of the kitchen toward the living room. "OUT! YOU DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE!! GET YOUR THINGS AND GO!"

Seriously, that was the most worked up I'd ever seen the knave since the King told him he'd not drive us to Peoria, Illinois to hear John Daker sing in the First United Methodist Church Sunday service. (Search YouTube for John Daker if you dare. Safe for work, unless you're a church musical director.)

Possible butter tart fixation at my house.

Thinking, if I do run a business, of calling it "Buttercup Palace." Now for a design...
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Goals:
* floss teeth at least three times a week
* coconut or unrefined sesame oil three times a week -- oil-pulling
* medication taken morning and night
* affirmations and energy routines and yoga three times a week

The people yipping about Citibank and Bank of America finding a new revenue source now that small businesses have lower debit card merchant transaction fees remind me of

The Kinks. Nobody's making them bank at those places, nobody's forcing them to use debit cards, and what were they doing when some of us were fleeing the banks because we couldn't have fee-free accounts anymore, or they shortened our grace periods, brought in arbitration... waiting for stuff to happen to THEM.

Paid $137 to VISA account.
Charged $35 for co-pay for doctor's visit today.
We have $400 for the week to tide us over. Weekly vegetables, grocery replenishments and a $10-$20 food bank donation are covered.

Cinerama big screen 70mm film festival starts tonight.
Hubby very keen to go.

Mortgage down to $118677 or something.
HELOC down to $15785 or something.
A stickler for budgeting figures I am. The important thing is that the balances are going down.

Achieved $16200 in liquid cash, have lipstick and two eyeliners, one sweater, one pair wool trousers, one pair cashmere socks.

Goals for next month: purchase of two replacement items.

As payback for not immediately giving a dollar to the beggar who paced the doors of a lecture hall to block departing people in a rush to get home (it was a free event, no beverages or snacks, so it wasn't a fine-frocked concert affair), I had a fitful sleep with hunger pangs, dreaming of the psychologically worst time of our uneducated-single-parent poverty-stricken childhood. I had two bowls of Indian-spiced lentils and rice before heading to the lecture hall and thought that might tide me overnight but no.

Fascinating to remember how ashamed I was of our Studebaker which was more recent than our current beater. I am ashamed of the beater, but I am determined to run it into the ground before getting a newer car, as I hope a midsize sedan with equivalent fuel efficiency will be in our price range at that time.

If I have $10 or $20 remaining at the end of the payperiod, it's going to the local food bank. People can't function properly with empty stomachs. I don't apologize for giving to a food bank or to organizations: they give me a receipt and tell me beforehand what they will do with the money.

Several are asking me for money (school, political, charity donations) but nobody is asking me to work for money. No more political donations unless the candidate or incumbent can find paying work for me.
No more school donations outside of book purchases.

Austerity can be tiring -- this is how I feel. My self-control is stretched. I buy makeup every two-three years instead of every 6 months to a year, many of my clothes are secondhand or 7 years old and too small for me. I am reducing my vitamin and supplement intake to Vitamin C, D and Udo's Choice 3-6-9 oil with multi-vitamins for a few weeks.

My second mortgage payment has been received: only 142 payments and 98.6% principal left to go! The interest portion is 25% less than it would have been if we didn't refinance, so I blink a few times when I see it on our online statement. I don't feel any richer with the smaller mortgage payment -- probably because I am acutely aware of how my city plans to raise our utility charges, introduce a $60 vehicle license tab ($60 is about what we pay all year for gas in the scooter!), and most damningly, increased coffee bean prices at Costco.

Made butter tarts as promised for my child as reward for getting over ten people to donate to his walk-a-thon: they went very fast -- his friend fought him (!!) for dibs, and my poor overworked and frustrated spouse pouted when there were none left for him, so I made two more while the boys were distracted by outside play. I thought three tarts each would satisfy the boys but no. My mom made butter tarts that my brother loved but I didn't -- maybe they are a guy thing. I exhausted my awesomeness points with the butter tarts and turned into a pumpkin the moment I left the house for the evening.

Wondering if I could try some "Mildred Pierce" style Depression-buster entrepreneurialism and make "butter tarts" the foodie trend that poutine seems to be here. Certainly there's a market for sugar...
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if anyone has made it this far, I express my gratitude to the SavingAdvice admins for the swift and routine extermination of the spam blogs.

Boy is fundraising for his school's walk-a-thon. He is adept at bringing in dough: $70 yesterday by threatening people that his mother would come back the club to play them if they didn't come up with money; then today I dropped him at a cafe to do some soliciting, which I wouldn't do unless I were well-known at that cafe, while I went to the post office. When I came back, he had one signature more with one dollar. I am happy that he had success. The donor looks at me and says "are you the motorcycle woman?" and when I answer yes he pulls out an extra five dollars to donate!

I have to take the scooter out tonight so am thinking of photocopying his donation form and finding everyone under 5'6" at tonight's event to ask for donations. He is going to ask the chess club tonight -- I gave one man there a lift to a bus stop a few weeks ago, and another man there knows his teacher, so it should be a good haul.

Expenditure: $12.68 for paperback gift for mother-in-law; $6.30 to mail it before her birthday.

My English Castle: no exercise except pushing the motorcycle (432 lbs) up a gentle incline.

Breve $4.31 (latte made with half'n'half) while waiting for
Oil change $44.32 (oil disposal fee 15% of that from "discount oil change places", with no feeble upselling questions from workers who ask by rote before checking service records)
Costco - $90.02 for meat, coffee, juice and cereal. Meat = whole chicken @ $0.99/lb; round roasts for $3.79/lb; organic ground beef @ $4.66/lb. Coffee at $5.19/pound: might be time to switch to yerba mate or green tea for second cups.
Gas - $3.70/gallon at Costco. Cheapest deal around -- filled tank for under $40. MPG: 25.64.

Guilt weighing heavily on me: I know there are no lottery tickets, pop, cigarettes or beer in the above list, but "meat, coffee, juice and cereal" seem so nonessential right now.

For My English Castle:
I got some REAL exercise: panting, heart-pounding exercise, hiking two trails in a state park. Oh my heart is in a woeful state. 1.0 miles, but last the 0.4 miles is on a steep and narrow trail. I had to stop twice to catch my breath.

$10 for day pass for the park, but four of us went, two of us high-energy tweens.

Money spent on espresso & pastries, above-mentioned state park fee and lamb chops for dinner. I saw BooBerry, FrankenBerry and Count Chocula cereals at Safeway, which we didn't have on our shelves back in the old country but boy! did we see the ads on US TV (grumble grumble). So my mind shot back to watching Christopher Glenn on "Take 30" (CBS? ABC?) and PSAs about our neighbours being "fuelish" and crying Indians, and I wanted to take a box each and nibble in front of the TV set watching a rented DVD box set of "Columbo". (I will not choose again to watch those Prescott-Scheimer cartoons, except "Fat Albert" or "Gilligan's Planet" if I had some really good mind-altering substances) My American husband said to me "Have you ever HAD those cereals?"
"Uh no, I just said..."
"But later in life, did you..."
"If I had, would I be yearning to take those home with me?"

If I didn't have a tween boy...
--------------

This is what you guys get for showing us your furshlugginer General Mills marshmallow cereal ads but not letting us have the cereal brands, thus delaying our eventual slide into obesity and Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Nyah!

This week in Notices of Trustee Sale:

$706155.72 owing on a house that was bought for $774K in 2004 and is now worth $733000.

A house purchased in 1986 with a $65000 mortgage that is now facing foreclosure with a $300000 loan. If I foreclose with a half-million-dollar mortgage I never paid, one year after I was supposed to pay it off, I am either institutionalized with mental illness or I have a nasty drug habit.

I cannot be the only fossil who remembers when a house was a "money pit" and not a "piggy bank/credit card".

Is it only people who grew up in other countries with shorter boom-bust cycles who know real estate can go down when they're not actually in a down cycle? Or people with at least a passing knowledge of economics?

Someone at the Blonde & Balanced Blog (I used to be both, am now neither) stated that homeownership peace of mind was most likely when the 20/25 rule was followed: 20% downpayment on a property, and no more than 25% of your gross income as a monthly payment.

Put some more toward the HELOC and look! I have one of my goals completed! It is my hope to have at least one goal crossed off every two weeks: at my least ambitious I am sure I can afford Maybelline or one gallon distilled water.

I took a Chinook Book coupon down to Take 2 Consignment and bought: one Benetton sweater, one pair wool pants, one silver-plated heart-motif cuff, one pair cashmere socks and one angora short-sleeved top, the latter of which will probably serve as a "party doll" for my cat if I do not take care of it.

With tax, $103 and change.

Despite the supposed obesity epidemic in the U.S., I found the pickings for size 12+ sparse in this quality consignment shop.

Not yet purchased boots: I found some cute ones at the consignment shop but they were ankle boots. OTOH they had a nice heel and scaring people in sexy boots will be key as a campaign coordinator and supporter for he challenger, as the incumbent is a 5'5" male.

In the boots I would be over six feet.

Special message for Chinese spammers: 笨天生的一堆肉 and 我肏死你老妈的臊屄，你那个王八蛋

They keep on top of things and can tell the difference between blogs dedicated to saving money and blogs dedicated to marketing spam.

Update of sorts: gold and silver took a steep dive this week, like Acapulco cliff steep. However, I am close to reaching my liquid cash reserves goal.

Went to Vancouver for overnight stay with my "eh" student to watch NHL HOCKEY practice. It's not so impressive to see them skate around the ice and shoot pucks, but it is impressive to see one of the most seriously injured players suit up and skate slowly in small circles leaning on one hip before practice begins, and then for the second practice stand in the players' box with his teammates while the "cleared for light contact" players don't show up practice. Reserved for one practice, watched two as the superstars came out for the second.

My son left an offering at the Rick Rypien memorial outside the arena. I learned later that the annual Terry Fox Run was happening in Vancouver and four new statues were unveiled. I feel like a bad Vancouverite/Canadian/bereaved-by-cancer-family-member for forgetting that.
Can I be forgiven for telling women in my locality and latitude how to cheaply protect against cancer?

For the extra Canadian experience I ordered a Montreal Smoked Meat (from Dunn's Deli! Authentic!) sandwich from Costco. Now I am wondering where I can get Montreal Smoked Meat (don't say Salumi) in Seattle. Eating smoked meat has nothing to do with cancer prevention. It has everything to do with homesickness.

I didn't speak French with anyone because... it's Vancouver. Seriously, my friends there speak French but I didn't see them. Speaking French in Vancouver is like speaking Spanish in Montpelier, Vermont.

Exercise update for My English Castle: I stretched upward to prune our giant rhododendron. The stretch was good for my cramps. Today I will go for a mile-long walk, and maybe buy some safe-haven currency, according to Peter Schiff.

Within an hour after I shifted $480 to the HELOC--my new goal is to pay $3650 between July 2011 and June 2012--my child came home with a Music Instruction Enrolment Form.

He wants to take music: his options are flute, violin, cello, clarinet, trombone and trumpet. I'd like something we can fit in the car, preferably rentable. He prefers brass, I prefer strings.

I think "yeah it's pricy but Chaplin was an impoverished actor when he started playing violin. Louis Armstrong was in a home for boys and he learned the trumpet. Fats Waller played piano."

So we'll discuss it this weekend. I'd like for him to visit a music store to try each of the instruments...



See? Men can look adorable playing strings.

People, businesses, organizations and nations who make it their business to murder United States citizens have had a lot of help from Chase Bank, despite sanctions imposed by the US Government making it illegal.

- http://www.chase-sucks.com/?p=98

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has been investigating a number of willful violations committed by Chase Bank going back to 2005. The list of laws violated by Chase Bank include:

Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations
Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations
Iranian Transactions Regulations
Cuban Assets Control Regulations
Sudanese Sanctions Regulations
Former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor Sanctions Regulations

Read the U.S. Department of the Treasury's documentation of Chase's sanctions violations.

Plus!
Here are some of the things that Chase Bank has already admitted to:

Violating the Federal Service Members Civil Relief Act. That law was enacted in 1942 to shield deployed military personnel from financial stress.
Overcharging roughly 6,000 active-duty military personnel on their mortgages.
Foreclosing on military personnel illegally and forcing them out on to the streets.
Chase has already had to return some of the homes they took illegally.
Chase has had to agree to pay back millions of dollars that they stole from US Military families.

Chase's activities do not sound patriotic to me.

"Don't mention the Waugh" update: I suggested A Handful of Dust for book club. I checked Wikipedia and found my son's teacher pronounces Waugh correctly. I didn't, I guess, because I first heard his name in North America. In London I had plaice for fish and chips and pronounced it "plice" because the English did it that way, and I speak English, then in Canada I told my mom and English stepfather about plaice and my mom said "it's pronounced 'place.'" So I had been pronouncing "Waugh" as "waw" in "law" "thaw" and "straw." It's "wor." Boy I had a good "lor" about that.

I saw my Resolutions 2011 post on OneNote: I thought I'd actually get my HELOC balance down below $12K by December. I still could. The HELOC auto withdrawal showed $43 interest applied. Before I borrowed for the roof, I'd managed to bring the interest down to $34 applied per month.

We're going to Vancouver this weekend for hockey training camp. This is roughly equivalent to going to Arizona for baseball training camp in spring, except driving is faster and cheaper.

From

The Consumerist:

Last year, several of the country's largest mortgage servicers — Bank of America, GMAC/Ally, JPMorgan Chase, among others — were forced to hit the pause button on foreclosure procedures after it was revealed that many foreclosure documents were being rubber stamped by untrained, ill-informed "robo-signers."

-- I bet I know where my incumbent School Board Director is going to apply his talents after my candidate unseats him in the fall election. He is tireless in his volunteer elected position because rubber-stamping the School District Superintendent (whom he is to supervise with six other school board directors) doesn't take much effort.

But seriously, this update negates my earlier supposition that things were getting better. "According to the folks at RealtyTrac, "Notices of Default," the first stage of the foreclosure process, rose 33 percent month-to-month in August. So, barring an encore of the robo-signing scandal, these properties will hit the market during the first few months of next year."

July 2011 Notice of Trustee Sales: 731 records
August 2011 Notice of Trustee Sales: 776 records
--- not quite 33%.

While this may be good news for potential home-buyers looking for a bargain, it seems likely that the glut of foreclosed properties will not be welcomed by homeowners looking to sell their houses.

This HELOC balance chokes my head and heart. I'm considering liquidating some certificates of deposit to rapidly reduce the balance.

Right now the HELOC usurps 17.173% of our available credit. It is our debt with the highest APR and the shortest payoff period.

If I wanted a car I could borrow up to 12% of our available credit. Weird that twelve years ago we were making less together than what the spouse makes now, paid 10% more for our mortgage. and had a car payment, and didn't see ourselves as suffering. See what fiscal responsibility conditioning can do to one?

The difficulty is working with my family. The boy and man seem to think that there's always money for afterschool activities, Pokemon booster decks and fantasy wargaming weekend tournaments. Meanwhile I have to wait eight weeks to replace my walking shoes and eleven weeks for a haircut. I desperately need some fall/winter skirts, tops, and boots. I buy at consignment stores and Value Village, except for the boots -- I always buy footwear new.

I saved some money yesterday: several years ago I bought some shabby chic style used bedside lamps. The paper lining in one of them disintegrated. I live close to a lampshade store that boasted 320 lampshades. I come in with my shade and am told that the style of my shade, specifically how the lightbulb is secured within the shade, is not one that is carried, and I'd be looking at $25 labour + $5 parts in addition to the purchase price of an equivalent lampshade. I look at the lamps available and they are priced from $95+. I go home, retrieve my SunUp daylight lamp, and secure it to the ceiling. Now I can program myself to wake up in the dark and have more space on my bedside table.

It saddens me that it is just one week away from the equinox and I have the daylight lamp operating. It also reminds me to take 2000 IU Vitamin D for every incremental hour of darkness. So in December I'd be taking 8000 IU of Vitamin D daily.

Several families I know are looking for a "new" used car. My credit union is having an auto loan dealer event this week, offering 2.49% on new cars, 2.99% used. I visited some participating dealers' websites and found one offering 0.9% on a 60-month auto loan for highly desirable (but currently out of our reach) cars. 2.49% APR for 3 years vs 0.9 for 5... even I know what the better deal is.

Yesterday was a bad day for me and electronics: crashed another person's machine (but I restored it within 90 minutes), my phone battery lost a lot of power. I'm a social media coordinator for this person and have been promoting her online but I wouldn't be surprised if she never let me touch her computer again. All I did was insert a thumb drive containing three small document files, no autorun.exe, no scripts, no viruses, no executables in the USB port on the left and the MACHINE SHUT ITSELF DOWN. That is NOT EXPECTED BEHAVIOUR.

We observed Meatless Monday last night. I get a special thrill of seeing my son eat zucchini and eggplant without complaint.

I have learned our city's water rates are among the highest in the nation -- why? we don't live in Palm Springs or Albuquerque or Bullhead City. We live on a coast. This explains why my water use is 54% of what it was last year, yet I am paying 95% of what I did last year. Naturally the city water utility rates for residential users will rise AGAIN. Utilities (except for natural gas), insurance companies, and child care businesses will always fix it so no matter how much less of a burden you or your child may be to their operating costs, you pay more than you did the year before. Oh yeah our assessment went down this next year but our property taxes went up.

Bellingham, Point Roberts or Coquitlam next year, I swear.

Although 87% of Jean Chatzky's Pay it Down is obvious and simple for anyone who's read a get-out-of-debt book, I'm forever hopeful for fresh innovative ideas and as I don't have a lot of options: no cable to cut, no gym memberships, no weekly massages, no second car (scooter doesn't count! that is for commuting to and from work!), I may do something daring and act on the obvious suggestions: record expenditures, exercise to lose weight, because calorie reduction, digestive enzymes and eating well (low carb, organic, lots of water) aren't helping me burn fat and lose weight.

Please support me as I attempt to rejoin the human race and make the effort to do what everybody else seems to do without effort.

Period: September 1 - September 10

Notice of Trustee Sales for King County, Washington State

in 2001: 47
Representative Notice of Trustee Sales shows five months' delinquency in payments, from 2/1/2007 to 6/1/2007. Obligation is $317,182 for property purchased @ $347K, now zillows for $225K.

in 2006: 77
in 2007: 97
in 2008: 217
in 2009: 339
in 2010: 451

in 2011: 188
Representative Notice of Trustee Sale shows total arrearage of $82221.18. Obligation is $308934.36 for property purchased in 1995 @ $27500. No, there really are two zeros -- that's a five-digit amount. Zillows for $253000.

I guess things are getting better, or getting slower.

Paid off our VISA account. It's now at a zero balance.
On track with HELOC payoff and savings, three weeks ahead with precious metals.
----------------------------------

I am happy for my son this school year: he has an excellent teacher, he shares a class with his best friend. During the acquainting/orientation week, my son has had interesting assignments:

1. bring a bag of four things that have special meaning for you, that help define who you are. One item was my country's flag, the desecration of which he told the class would lead to "the Deputy of England's order of beheading."* Another item shared with the class is The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey, an illustrated little alphabet poem about 26 children who die in horrific, vulgar and painful ways. The boy memorized the book when he was three and would recite it for our Goth friends.

* It is not the flag of England. The teacher is from England.

2. decorate your composition book with pictures and photographs. We had too much fun with this and nearly turned it into "Their Satanic Majesties Request," "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," or "We're Only In It For The Money," crammed with people. My treasured moment was when we affixed Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) next to a text strip of "Don't Mention The", and then Evelyn Waugh.

Scroll to 5:45 for the 'Who Wrote "Brideshead Revisited"?'

Waiting for that parent-teacher conference call...
I am determined to become the parent who supervises her child's homework and makes sure it is done well, and unlike last school year my child WILL exceed standards on the Measurement of Student Progress Tests. Not one of seventeen boys in his grade at his school exceeded standards, despite six of those boys taking accelerated math, and despite my child's competency in reading ranking close to two grades higher. It makes me wonder if "Glee", "High School Musical" and Justin Bieber monopolized the content components of the tests.

Otherwise we have no excuse to play in the fields of the staff's minds...

...for me. My kid had an okay day except for the buses taking extra time dropping off children on the home trip, owing to security roster check-off procedure. He was worried we'd be upset about his tardiness that he ran, tripped, fell and skinned both his knees. I don't know what happened between then and his arrival other than he lay on the ground until a neighbor "Juan" helped him walk home.(If it were any other kid but mine I'd have been concerned, but mine equates a nosebleed with a near-death experience.) Bandages, there-theres and vanilla custard made for a rapid recovery. His haste was in vain: I already got a phone call from the district transportation. I wonder if he's seen too much "Sons of the Desert" (1933 film, Laurel and Hardy star in it -- at the end they await punishment). I've not EVER laid a hand on him south of the neck--I don't believe in corporal punishment--but let me whip a belt in front of him and he's a

tearful Stan Laurel.

CoreLogic's 2011 first quarter report on home equity is a downer, although its headline claims a slight decrease in negative equity. My Schadenfreude spreadsheet shows the largest negative equity amount as -$32679, half of the national average. We have been in an equity downturn for so long I am beginning to feel like a chump for paying the mortgage. Ohio's average negative equity amount among underwater homeowners is -$31000, the lowest average in the nation. In my state, Washington, 16.9% of mortgages are underwater. That's a disturbingly high number: I would say 70% of the states have lower percentages of negative equity mortgages.
Average property value in our state is $303874. Average equity in our state is $97289.

Once in a while I will read newspaper columns and online petitions about people who want loan modifications from their mortgage processors, and frequently I read notice of trustee sales where the mortgagee owes dozens of thousands more than what the property would sell for. Some lawyers advise their clients to live in their houses for up to a year without paying, and then walk away. As the Sex Pistols say, "when there's no future, how can there be sin?"

I received an e-mail from "ReadyForZero.com" -- I must have signed up for this at some point but everything is a haze as my brain atrophies. I don't believe I'd put my debt accounts info on a third-party website. I have one page of my debts on my credit union page. And several freebie debt repayment calculators. ReadyForZero.com boasts that its registered users pay debt twice as fast as those who don't use the site. Maybe that claim is true. I'd like to pay off my HELOC, but not to sacrifice the pleassure of paying for the car in cash, or my precious metals. I'm uncomfortable enough with my debt to post about it here, but for now I'll content myself with tooling about with my spreadsheets.

Listening to "Old Codger", an occasional WFMU podcast where someone pretending to be a contemporary of Mamie Smith and Sophie Tucker "plays 78rpm records like they're going out of style!" Paying off mortgages seems to be going out of style, too.

Signed, My Kvetchy Mama


Aren't women grand?

Feeling brain-damaged, sleep-deprived and unsuitable to be out with humans.

I don't know if that is a good sign or a bad sign. People talk to me about buying cars, and their hospital bills, and I see hot tubs on people's properties. I imagine our recent mortgage refinance will mean a hit on our credit score, so it would be best to buy the car with 100% cash, or a combination of cash and credit cards. I see that my liquid savings is not quite enough to pay off our home equity line of credit. I also see we use our credit card every month, and not all families do that. I would like to see us restrict our credit card use to: ordering online; emergency usage; out-of-the-country usage; rental cars; hotel reservations.

From a May 2011 HousingWire article:
[quote]U.S. consumers also reduced their revolving credit card debt by 18% since mid-2008 through default, borrowing less or paying down debt outstanding. This is the longest and fastest credit card deleveraging since record keeping began in January 1968.[/quote]

That's good. No doubt the raising of the minimum payment as mandated by Congress had something to do with that.

My husband tries to comfort me to say that many people are in debt, but I say if one is uncomfortable with one's debt burden, one has taken on too much debt.

We aren't doing ourselves any financial favours by eating out, either. The boy and man went to Flying Squirrel Pizza to welcome it to our neighbourhood, and the man returned looking as overjoyed as he was in Gainsbourg, looking at the Scopitones and having good food, booze and dessert. Then we learned a beloved dessert place may be lost as the building housing it is to be demolished.

Today I perform inventories on the freezer, pantry and larder, as I promised myself not to go shopping for groceries until I had a menu plan, and I'm buying lunch supplies for the boy tomorrow, the day before school starts. I hate turfing out vegetables that have gone bad.

My son and I are attempting to eliminate the word "should" from our vocabularies. Replacing it with "must" or "will" or "would like to" or "plan to" makes it sound less like we are distanced from making appropriate choices in our lives.

I would give serious consideration to the Costco Auto Buying Program. This isn't a paid ad. I didn't know until today that Costco recently amended its Buying Program to include used vehicles. The

My Money Blog has dozens of comments, good and bad, about the Costco purchase experience. See you can tell this isn't a paid ad because I am not linking to Costco.

I looked at Yelp! and saw so many of the car dealerships within walking distance of my house with one-star reviews. But several of the people giving those one-star reviews did not get the cars checked out by independent auto mechanics within the first three days.

I found Car Buying Tips informative too, for used and new vehicles, especially the parts about extended warranties and what to look for at auto auctions.

I have a spreadsheet of vehicles I might want to buy, with their specifications, features, safety-performance-reliability ratings, suggested buy prices, fuel economy, and importantly for us who are all extremities, headroom and legroom measurements. Yesterday a neighbor told me she was shopping for a car similar to what I want: sedan, $14000-$17000, decent mileage; so I gave her print copies of my research. I guess there are many nerdy underemployed research types in my area, because those cars are hard to find at that price range. More like $16K-$18K, before taxes, license fees, documentation fees.

I had to look three times to make sure that the Feds really meant United States Federal Government Authorities when I saw the headline

Feds Sue Big Banks Over Sales of Risky Investments.

What was the point of spending Trillions of Dollars bailing out the Banks if you are going to turn around and sue them for $30Bn and drop their stock price another Trillion, causing them to need another bailout?

Will someone please explain this to me? What I find confusing is some unnamed "saviour of Bank of America" billionaire investor bought some preferred bonds, the day after he had a chinwag with the U.S. President, and then this.

----
I completed a series of online cognitive processing tasks with the carrot-dangle of a chance for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. I was identified as "an expert Scrabble player" despite not having played a tournament game for seven years. I did okay against an expert who plays several times a week, and I helped my little tot score 500+ points against an adult two weeks ago, so not all the brain cells have died.

I am also helping a local school board candidate (Challenger) with her campaign. She wants a world-class school district but having been educated in another part of the world I will realistically settle for a school district that doesn't make me itchy to send my kid to Catholic school or to the next school district 35 blocks north, or even the next nation north.

The year looks promising for boy: his tormentor has moved back to his home country; his best friend and another playmate from his old school have joined them at his school, and his teacher who was available at back-to-school night is English. My boy watches UK panel shows and old comedy shows on YT so this will be fun for him. His teacher can tell him about The Old Smoke's Fine Music Culture Contributions (YouTube, no foul language and no nudity)

Today I did some desktop publishing and later I will do a reconnaissance mission on her website and look for ways to make it better, and create a Word document for people to mail their donation forms if they don't want to use PayPal. I actually think she has a great shot of winning, as long as voters in my city learn how the incumbents have been wasting money.