Get rich slowly

So in the space of a year, Jen and I will have both changed jobs/career paths, bought a car, bought a house and had a baby. We are so much more adult than we used to be. It's time to start saving money like good adults. I stumbled across this blog post from a guy who read 8 financial self help books and summarized them.

Lots of great stuff here. Jen and I are going to have to sit down and come up with a battle plan based on this info. Much of it is common sense, but it's not common sense that we apply in our day to day lives. You just have to be cognizant of your money and where it goes. I love the idea of automatic saving plans. That's how we saved up the money for our mortgage down payment. It only took a year! Imagine what we can do if it's just part of our daily live for the next 30 years.

Aside: Remind me to come up with a Halloween costume that somehow involves a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it. There's something inherently funny about that to me. Do robbers in old British movies and comics have bags with "£" on them?

The Star Wars dilemma

I'm a good card carrying geek. Yet, somehow, I'm not amped up to see Revenge of the Sith. Part of me doesn't want to give George Lucas any more of my money after the fist clenchingly boring Episodes I and II. Part of me says, I know how this film ends. Hell, we all do. Anakin becomes Vader, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a bit like watching a baseball game on tape when you've already seen the boxscore.

So story isn't a draw. Nor is the stellar dialogue that Lucas tends to write. So what could be the draw for me? The fights. Saber duels are the only thing that will get me excited about this movie. I think the only thing I remember from the second film is that Yoda pulls off a butterfly twist kick that only kung fu junkies can comprehend. Oh yeah, and that horrifying "Padme and Anakin having a picnic by a waterfall" scene. I've got about 6 ounces of scar tissue in my brain because of that. Just awful.

Here's something that's been bothering me for a while. Why the heck do they keep using C3PO and R2-D2 through out the two triologies? By the time Return of the Jedi rolls around, these are both 30 year old robots! I can't keep a computer for more that 3 years without it becoming outdated. C'mon!

Maybe I'll see it. Maybe I won't. Will someone tell me if Yoda pulls off a 720 tornado kick? I might pay to see that.

Siteseeing in my dreams

I've been waking up the past few nights with allergy problems. I've been getting up later and later in the cycle. It was 1:29 the first night, 2:45 the next, 3:30 and finally today, 4:40. That's late enough for me to say, "Screw it. Just get up and get on with your day."

I was having a weird dream, where Jen and I are touring the Northeast driving to these remote towns where they have drawbridges where they play controversal songs continously. Jen is excited to go to the Sinead O'Connor bridge. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is playing on the green metal span above a colorful autumn valley. She's here for tearing the Pope's picture on TV.

The next bridge is over a railroad in an industrial downtown. It's a song called, "Knit Slacks" It sounds like a lost B-52s song from the Bouncing Off the Satellites era. "KNIT! (spidery guitar riff) SLACKS!" I have no idea why this song is such a troublemaker, but it's weirdly enjoyable.

Our next destination is the pie factory outlet. It's filled with irregular pies at a deep discount. I open a box that holds a broken pecan pie, when I wake up stuffed up.

Playing detective

Our real estate agent is really cool guy and found an amazing link for us. The city of Boston has digitized all of the building permits in the city records and made it searchable from this link.

It's a clunky page, but work the time to get it working. You MUST use Internet Explorer. And when you enter an address don't put in the full street name. For example, "Beacon St." returns no hits, whereas "Beacon" does.

Here are some crazy things that I found out.

• The building we currently live in used to have an elevator that was cited for violations at least 5 times since the 1920's. There also used to be a dentist's office in the front (Dr. Austin Cheever).
  
  
• Our new place was built in 1890, by a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
  
  
• The place I lived in up the street when I was single was nearly condemned while I was living in it. There was structural damage in a brick wall in the basement. The inspectors really should have looked at the stairs too. Jen was always convinced it was a deathtrap, and now she has documentation for it.
  

Hail to the Chief

It's easy to fall into patterns. I park in the same spot in the garage every morning at 7:55. Every morning, I walk by the same navy blue Hyundai SCoupe with an empty Poland Spring bottle and metro Boston street atlas in the tiny back seat, parked end first waiting to bolt home 9 hours later. And every morning, I notice that the car was purchased at President Hyundai and I think it'd be funny to write a short story about Dylan Fong, who runs President Hyundai, which was founded by his grandfather in 1975. His grandfather though Fong Ford/Lincoln/Mercury sounded too foreign for the good people of New Hampshire, so he called it President Ford and President Lincoln/Mercury. But over the years, the market changed and expanded, which is how we ended up with President Hyundai and President Saturn. But then I get in the elevator and the story never gets much further than that. This is the closest I may get to writing that story.

Notes on music of 1982

Our pals Joe and Leslie stayed with us the other night on there 1/2 cross country drive from Chicago to the east coast. Joe brought us a ton of MP3s from the 80's on CD-R. We both own Scions which play these sort of discs. So yesterday, I took the long way to work and cranked some great old songs from the 1982 disc.

• Am I remembering it wrong, or does Thomas Dolby look like Alton Brown? Must look in to this.
  
  
• Doesn't the name "Simon Le Bon" sound like an old French king? Like there was a "Simon Le Mal" and they had to differentiate them?
  
  
• Listening to this CD is like living a K-Tel compliation commerical. A song comes on for a few seconds, I conjure up an image of the music video in my mind, then the artist and title scroll past. If it's not a song I like, I skip to the next track and it all starts again.
  
  
• Does anyone remember what Survivor looked like? I can only conjure images from Rocky III. I recently saw a Starbucks commerical that used "Eye of the Tiger" that had a band following people around getting them psyched up by playing a customized version of the song for them. Anyone know if that was really Survivor, or it was just central casting?
  
  
• Dammit! I thought I'd erased all of the Air Supply from my mind.
  
  
• Why do I remember so much music from when I was 10 years old? The Chickpea's gonna know the songs of 2015 way too well.
  
  
• The song "The Girl Is Mine" cracks me up. Mostly for the line "I'm a lover, not a fighter." But let's think about this for a second. What woman would be interesting in Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson at the same time today? At this point, wouldn't any woman say, "Listen, Michael, we can still be friends. Paul and I are moving in together."
  
  
• I'd nearly forgotten about the Frieda song "There's Something Going On" That's on me. Sorry about that, Freeds. That song rocks.
  
  
• It always sounded like "Jacques, le monkey" to me.
  
  p.s. Maybe they don't look that much alike...
  
  

Roxbury Line: Bookend?

So, I feel comfortable talking about it now. After looking at 15 to 20 places on Sunday, we put in an offer on a home. After a little bit of back and forth, ("They're willing to leave the washer and dryer, but want $10,000 more than you're offering"), we have an agreement.

It's a single family home in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. It's not the most glamorous neighborhood in the world, but it is only a 5 minute walk from the South End (which is certainly Boston glam) and it's about half of what we would have paid if the house were simply 5 blocks east of where it is now. Real estate agents like to call the area we're in a "South End alternative" or "a bookend neighborhood to the South End". Roxy, our cat, likes to call it "Roxybury".

We'll get some decent pictures up here later, as all we have are little shots from the real estate websites. It's three floors and 1050 square feet. You walk in on the second level and there's a formal dining room and a living room. Down in the basement is the kitchen, the 1/2 bath, the storage area/pantry and the patio that opens out on to the backyard. Upstairs are the two bedrooms and the main bath.

Since the kitchen and the dining room are on separate floors, I doubt that we'll use the dining room much, so the plan is to convert it into a library with comfy chairs to sit and read in and a table for spreading out the newspaper and studying. If you've ever been to our apartment, you know we have lots of books, and anticipate lots more for the Chickpea. Maybe, we should get him a little reading rug like you had in elementary school. Or we could get him a matching comfy reading chair. I'm so excited about this house, but especially about this room.

Jen's really excited about the storage space (I know. I think it's impossible for men to get excited about storage space.) and the yard. Now, the yard does rock. It's small, but plenty big for Chickpea's first steps and a nice garden.

We had no idea that we'd be able to get a single family home in the city. We had resigned ourselves to sharing a two or three family in Jamaica Plain or someplace like that. We hadn't really considered Roxbury until we saw this place. I think people are afraid of moving into a neighborhood that they don't see a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts on every corner. There's something to be said about the local bodega and knowing that you know the name of the guy who works there, because it's his name on the store.