About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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December 19, 2008
After another patted shoulder “don’t worry,” I literally bite my tongue. It’s the only way not to completely lose my good traditional training of not talking back to my elders. Or in this case, “raving at elder.”
Why, on the eve of a very important, very early, phone interview was I up, running outside barefoot over an hour before scheduled alarm? Hi, it’s still me here, still the girl who gets up only ten minutes before departure. That’d be because I woke to the sound of an unscheduled alarm. The car alarm.
I would have ignored it; I usually do as sleep is precious beyond words. Something stirred me to go see this time, though, to possibly do our neighbors the courtesy of silencing an errant alarm. What I saw, peeking out the blinds, however, was no errancy except that of a flurry of indistinguishable human activity. Startled, I raced outside barefoot to watch the family sedan driving away backwards. Towed.
Are there even words for the sheer fury that swamped me? I woke my dad hoping it was a mistake. Suspecting that it was not.
It wasn’t.
He hasn’t been able to keep up with the payments lately. What an innocent sounding statement until combined with the towed car.
I am positively furious and humiliated. Above all, betrayed. It wasn’t more than a month ago that I’d told him our communication was poor. I couldn’t trust their judgement and sensibility. He seemed surprised, he protested my characterization.
Well, surprise! I can’t.
This wasn’t a sudden, unexpected thing. (At least not for him.) This is what happens when you don’t pay, pay in time, and keep paying on time.
So what now? We’re down to my car. That’s it. It’s Friday morning, if I don’t throw cash at the situation, who knows how much, we’ll have to share my car for the weekend and I have a very full weekend. Heck, who knows, if I’ll have enough? Tow truck fees, plus whatever else. I don’t know. All I know is I’m losing more precious sleep because he can’t take care of business, can’t learn to tell me before something is about to become an exponentially larger pain in my ass so we can alleviate the situation. No, because “I can’t keep running to you.” No? But you think it’s right to wait until it’s a disaster before telling me that there are dark clouds in the sky?
Edit: Above written at 4 am.
Update: It turns out he’s over a thousand dollars behind. Deep breath.
It’s not that I can’t shake the money loose from somewhere. It’s that I have to because he won’t learn. That I have to tell my own dad that this is why I have trust issues, why I don’t think we have good communication, why I have to be anxious. That I told him months ago that my work situation was B.A.D. and last night that we’re all going to be laid off. That, in this lousy situation, he thinks it’s better to hide this situation and let it go into arrears!
“Why Mom is slowly losing her mind,” a part of my mind whispers disloyally, quietly, “this is why she’s losing her grip on reality. Living with him and letting him ‘handle it’ is, for her, to expect failure and disappointment. If it weren’t for me, would they be on the street in a matter of months? Weeks? How long would it be?”
It’s going to cost at least $1300 just to catch up on the payments. They’re waiting for a manager to review the file on Monday before they release information on how to get the car, according to him. That’s unacceptable but I’m stuck at work now and can’t follow up on my own.
I’m so mad I could spit.
And after this bailout, then what? Do I scrape up the cash to pay off *yet another* car since he obviously can’t afford this monthly payment? Call in my personal loans to free up cash and pay off all possible debts that I’m aware of? Create a blank slate for him while I try to support two households? If I don’t, he’s going to keep on trying to make two ends that are too short meet without telling me when he’s run into a rough patch, until we incur extra stupid fees. If I do, will he learn? Or will this just happen again?
Job hunting wasn’t challenging enough?
Forever and a half ago, FB (who is no longer broke) of Fabulously Broke in the City, discussed storage and organizing extensively. One of the problems she and several of her readers, including me, encountered was a way to neatly store electronic debris such as cables, boxes, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t find the original post I’m thinking of. This is a substitute post/link from FB.
I, for one, can’t bear to throw away boxes that my gadgets came in, as though I’m ever going to gently place the item back in its original packaging. It’s been ten years since I had my first electronic doodad (a pager, remember those?) and I can’t recall a single time the item has been boxed up. In my packratty mind, there’s always the standard “but what if you move?” protest. What? Like I’m going to repack my cell phone if I decide to move to a new apartment? My iPod, perhaps? No.
Nevertheless, I keep the boxes. One might feasibly blame it on Apple for designing such sturdy, attractive boxes that a packrat cannot resist; one might blame it on an evil mind that thinks it’d be perfect to wrap a completely non-iPhone gift in the box for someone. Whatever. We’ve established that I’m crazy and have to keep all electronics-related paraphernelia. Given that fetish, I’ve finally arrived at a nearly-great solution.
I’ll admit it doesn’t meet the standard of being easy to see at a glance like you could if they were say, in Ziplocs and hanging on a sales rack. Not that you would do that anyway. You would have to access the storage unit to see what’s in there, but I still like it.
I don’t have cables that need storing right now, but the aforementioned Apple-branded boxes and packages are currently my problem, and I’d like your thoughts on the solution:
December 18, 2008
It’s too late now, but it occurred to me that for all of my agonizing over finding the best price and fit in a new laptop, I neglected to fully maximize possible cashback options.
I did use ebates.com for a 1% cashback rebate. (If anyone wants a referral, we each get $5.)
That’s about $7 back, if they include cashback on tax.
I did use my Citi card that offers 2% back on all purchases in Thank You points.
That’s 1466 Thank You points.
However, I did not think to use my Chase Cash Plus card at the grocery store for 5% cashback rewards. [“Wait, what?” you ask. I know, I’m getting there.]
If I had gone to Vons/Safeway, using my Chase card to purchase a $700 Best Buy gift card, I would have earned 3500 points. That’s the equivalent of $35 because 5000 points can be redeemed for $50 cash, instead of a piddling 1466 Thank You points which cash out at an average rate of 6000/12000 points for $50/$100 gift cards.
Hmph. I could have stopped by the grocery store on my way home from work on Monday and more than doubled my cashback, in actual cash. Careless, I tell you. Miss M, you can still benefit from my mistake!
The weather caused the cancellation of dinner with my friends last night, and delayed the delivery of my new gadget by a day. Rats!
I was so looking forward to opening up that box tonight, but it’s probably for the best that it won’t be delivered until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that there are more productive things I should be doing tonight that don’t include endlessly playing with a pretty new computer.
I’m glad the weather’s back to bright skies, though still frigidly-cold, because my friends up in the desert have been snowed in since yesterday. She scared me when she told me about their driving home from dinner. They were sliding all over the road, and had to help dig out three neighbors when they finally arrived at her sister’s house, as well as the ambulance and the fire truck that got stuck in a drift. They had to dig out a fire truck. That’s just wrong. And weird. And for all of you cold weather dwellers out there laughing at me, laugh away. A foot of snow + SoCal drivers who forget how to drive in rain = freaks me out.
December 17, 2008
- Getting drafts of apps together on Gmail during my breaks. I think it’s best to do that while I’m fresher during the day and send off at night. We’ll see what pans out.
- Trivia: Do you know who wrote and sang Same Auld Lang Syne? I do! But wouldn’t without Google. That song always used to make me tear up as an adolescent. Now it just reminds me of being a kid. And sticks in my head for hours after hearing it. Also, why are Greensleeves and Canon in D (Pachelbel’s Canon) in the radio station’s Christmas music rotation?
- While Ctrl+T is good for me, Ctrl+Q almost always screws me up. Thank goodness for Auto-Save because shutting down the whole program in the middle of a document drives me nuts.
- I know money doesn’t “buy happiness” but there are days I wish I had oodles to give away where it could really help.
It just occurred to me that it’s Wednesday. Payday!
December 16, 2008
after tax and shipping.
I just bought this lovely thing which should be delivered in about a week:
A few specs:
15.4 inch screen
3 GB with capacity to upgrade to 4 GB
250 GB hard drive
4 USB ports
If I’d been willing to spend twice as much, I could have gotten a smaller screen size – 14.1 inches was my ideal, and a much lighter machine, but now’s not the time to be splurging that much.
I was swooning over the Lenovo U series — starting at 2.47 pounds? Yes, gorgeous, come along with me …… But I don’t have two thousand to spend on it.
Budgetary Note: That’s pretty much cleared out almost my entire gift/travel fund.
December 15, 2008
Blame it on the cold – my synapses are frozen. No less than five times this morning I’ve remembered and forgotten what I needed to call and ask my best friend, what I was just going to do a minute ago, what I need to write on my to-do today list, what notes to add to my reminder post-it. That’d be five times, each, my friends. *tsk*
I’m about to forget my own head, and it’s still attached to my body!
Hm, also blame it on being so busy this weekend that I essentially took it off from the mile-long list of chores and wrapping-up activities associated with changing just about everything in your life. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but trying to start over, alone, in a new place, and not having a home base to come back to is a whole new experience for me. And the weather backed up the traffic and transportation all morning so that I started the day running pretty late. 😛 I like rain but the first few days are always tough on transportation.
In good news: we might have a buyer for the truck! Cross your fingers with me that this will go through. That’s another thing to take care of, actually. I need to get an ETA on the title, am considering paying it off right now to hurry up the process but I will call the financing company first to find out what the best procedure will be. The lump sum wouldn’t clean out my expense fund, and if the buyer is serious about this and paying cash, it’ll be “paid back” right quick.
Also in good news: I have a nibble on the applications front. Kind of scary, but good, too.
Oh, and Ctrl+T? Every time I think of yet another thing to do, call, work on, etc., I open up another browser window and type it in. That way I’m forced to deal with each item before I can close the window. That doesn’t work well when I spastically Ctrl+W too quickly, though.
