I took the bus to work this morning because Kabluey needed the car and I had to leave earlier than usual to attend a breakfast meeting with three other members of my department. Unlike driving in the car, where we have learned I have to sacrifice my text messaging abilities in the name of safety and/or obeying the law, the bus allows me plenty of time to rattle off messages to my co-workers. And when I have to wait for the bus for twenty-two minutes in the freezing cold, those messages go something like this:

Shit-bag bus finally came. Will be late. Start without me and brace yourselves because I am about to come fucking unhinged.

It may be hard to tell from the above passage, but I actually really like taking the bus to work. I find the total lack of control over my commute relaxing. And I think it’s beneficial for my body to be exposed to so many different kinds of germs all in one confined space. It keeps my immune system in peak condition. Traveling on the bus is adding years to my life, I just know it. But best of all, the people that ride the bus with me are generally amazing.

Take the middle-aged lesbian couple that was sitting across the aisle and a few rows up from me. They were a spiky-haired, multi-hoop-ear-ringed, corduroy-clad sight to behold, and the closer they got to down town, the more in love with each other they fell. By the time one of the women arrived at her stop they couldn’t even get their I love you’s out without kissing between each word. Then there was the soft stroking of cheeks and the affectionate gazing into each others eyes.

I was convinced that I was witnessing a grand farewell. Surely this woman was departing on a long journey to some remote destination far removed from phones and computers and other modes of communication. Only, she didn’t have a suitcase of any kind (wait, does a fanny-pack count as luggage?), and I noticed that there was a lanyard around her neck holding what appeared to be a form of employee identification. No, this woman was not leaving her lover behind while embarking on an extended adventure. She was merely going to her desk job at Standard Insurance. And I got to witness what is probably their daily goodbye routine. That is why the bus is, at times, quite magical.

Really, the only issue I have with taking the bus to work is the same one I have with driving to work- both rides end with me at my job for at least 9 hours. Though maybe that isn’t the bus’ fault. Perhaps there is something that could be done to make my employment destination less miserable. Maybe the problem is me.

Nah, that can’t be it.

Tags: bad lesbian fashion, Trimet

“Blurf”. That was the text message I sent to Kabluey when I was on my way to pick her up after work. It was supposed to say “close”, as in short-hand for “I am close to your office”. But for various reasons, including traffic laws and chronic fatigue, my communication was reduced to “blurf”.

I know that texting while driving is a dangerous and stupid thing to do. I whole-heartedly agree with the new law that went into effect on January 1 that prohibits this behavior. I agree with it, but I don’t always follow it. Now when I have a need to send a text message while in my car, I implement a few new techniques and precautionary measures:

1. Look for cops
2. Hold the phone down near my knees in case there is a nearby cop that I somehow didn’t notice
3. Type super fast and don’t bother re-reading before hitting the send button

Add to the above circumstances a case of extreme exhaustion caused almost entirely by a need to put in ridiculously long hours at work in order to give the consumer world one more way to buy glucosamine supplements online, and you end up with nonsense text messages that say “blurf” and a Kabluey who will never let you live it down.

Of general interest (or not): spell check indicated that the word “glucosamine” in the above paragraph was misspelled. When I clicked on it to see what my options were, one of the words spell check offered as a suggestion was “Gewurztraminer”. Admittedly I had no idea what that word meant, so I looked it up. Turns out, it is an aromatic wine grape. If I was tasked with selling these delightful grapes online, I would surely have a much greater sense of job satisfaction. If you are interested, you can learn more about Gewurztraminer here.

Mega Bucks results= 0 numbers
Win for Life results= 1 number (no cash value).

I am particularly sad about the Win for Life results. It’s my favorite lottery game to play (and yes, I bought an extra ticket last week because my financial windfall was burning a hole in my pocket). The grand prize in Win for Life is $1000 a week- every week for the rest of your life. This seems like a very reasonable prize to win.

I always read about people who win the lottery and become instant millionaires only to end up sad and alone and somehow broke. On the one hand, I’m willing to take my chances- see if I can beat the odds. But millions and millions of dollars thrust into your life in an instant does seem extravagant, and extravagant is not really my style.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think my style may be to have enough money deposited into my account each week to pay most of my major bills. Yep, I can see that working out real nice.

I’m currently experiencing one of those rare (and probably fleeting) times when I feel like I am not in financial ruin. This unfamiliar sensation started on Thursday, when I found out from my loan officer that my appraisal had been revised and now shows a higher value for my home. This change means my refinance can go through as planned, and a $200 monthly savings is in my near future. (Take that, bitch-cow appraiser!)

To make a good situation even better, when the loan officer was updating my loan, she made what appears to be a clerical error and now, for reasons that are slightly fuzzy to me, I’ll be getting $1200 back at closing. I probably should look into this a little more, but at the moment I am content to keep my mouth shut, pay $6 more a month for my loan, and pocket the cash. And speaking of cash, it also appears that when the loan closes that magical thing will happen where I somehow don’t have to make a mortgage payment for one month. Add to all of this the fact that I got my tax refund on Friday, and I’m basically rolling in money.

Historically, I am not good at rolling in money. The urge to spend becomes overwhelming, and while I haven’t done anything too rash (yet) the desire is certainly there. For example, I suddenly feel like I can’t go another minute without an iPhone.

Side note: Interestingly, an iPhone wouldn’t be the worst thing for me to buy. I get a reimbursement from work for my cell phone bill and, because of some administrative screw up by AT&T that I have tried in vain to sort out, every month I pay my bill, and every month they send me a check refunding it. So, between the reimbursement and the refund, I am actually making money each month on my cell phone.

(The above side note is clearly the groundwork of an elaborate effort to ultimately justify the purchase of an iPhone).

What I really should, and hopefully will, use this money for is to deal with the issues in the main bathroom of my house. A full remodel would be great. Fixing the gaping hole in the wall and repairing the broken pipe so I could, I don’t know, actually shower in it is pretty much a necessity.

Even knowing that I must use my money for this bathroom project, I couldn’t help but sign Kabluey and I up for an year-long membership to the Hopworks Mug Club. We go to Hopworks pretty frequently, and will probably increase our appearances there over the summer, when we can walk the pups there and sit outside while we drink a beer. There are assorted perks to the club, including 21oz beers for the price of 16oz, special parties and exclusive beers. But best of all, we both got free (loose interpretation of that word) t-shirts! And anyone who knows me knows that I will do just about anything for a t-shirt.

Tags: Home refinance, Hopworks, tax refund

I’m doing a sprint triathlon in the beginning of May, and I really need to get back on a swimming schedule. I can half-ass the bike and run parts of a triathlon, but if I don’t reach a certain performance level on the swim, there’s a fairly good chance I’ll drown. The problem is that the pool at 24 Hour Fitness is pretty crowded in the early morning and after work. Because of this, I hadn’t been swimming in quite some time. I decided today to pack my gym bag and swim some laps at lunch time.

Amazingly, I actually went.

Predictably, my swim was a disaster.

I have a love/hate relationship with swimming. At this precise moment, I am firmly planted on the “hate” end of that. When I am swimming routinely, and not training for a specific event (which seems to send me into a panic), swimming is my favorite form of exercise. It relaxes me and, because I cannot see myself when I’m in the pool, I can trick myself into thinking I am fluid and smooth in the water. When I am not swimming regularly, I flail and gasp and wonder why no one around me seems concerned at all for my well being or the fact that at any moment I could sink permanently below the surface of the water.

I know it will feel better once I get back into the swing of things. I remind myself that two years ago I was so fast and focused in the swimming portion of my race that I actually lost track of my distance and swam an extra lap. A volunteer had to reach into the pool, grab me, and fling me onto the concrete pool deck like a beached whale. That may not sound like a good memory, but I was really fast that year!

I also know that as bad as my form was in the pool today, it could be worse. The last time I went to the pool the man in the lane next to me was wearing a t-shirt, cargo shorts and a baseball hat. It goes without saying that he dragged a little in the water. Then there’s Kabluey. Several months back I was trying to give her some pointers on the freestyle stroke. I had watched a video of Australian Olympian Ian Thorpe (”The Thorpedo”), and decided the knowledge gained from that YouTube video, plus a handful of novice triathlons, qualified me to give her instruction in the pool. Even after extensive schooling from me, she swims with her body in an “L” shape, with her torso parallel to the surface of the water and her legs perpendicular. A Thorpedo, she is not.

Rather than simply dwell on my poor performance in the pool, I like to diversify my feelings of inadequacy, so it was perfect that I had a soccer game tonight. I did lots of running and kicking (by kicking I mean swinging my leg in the general direction of the ball, and by no means am I implying that I regularly made contact) and at the end I was tired and sweaty and wondering how many seasons I have to play before my soccer skills make themselves known.

Now, before I call it a day, I’m thinking I should attempt to do a few more things I am bad at. Like math problems. Or piano scales. Or writing in cursive.

Tags: soccer, triathlon training

I got one lousy number on the recent Mega Bucks drawing. As such, I will not be quitting my job today.

After checking my numbers and realizing I was a big loser (hmm, that statement is true on several levels), I proceeded with my standard routine for disposing of tickets: I angrily tore it into one-hundred-million tiny pieces. I have this strange paranoia that I somehow misread the winning numbers, and I don’t want to just throw an in-tact ticket into the recycling box at my desk. The distress of not winning the lottery week after week is already almost more than I can handle. Imagine if I came across this headline in the Oregonian:

Cleaning Crew Finds Winning Lottery Ticket in Trash. Idiot Office Worker’s Loss is Janitor’s Multi-million Dollar Gain!

I realize that the “if I can’t win, no one can” mentality makes me kind of a jerk. Fine. I’m a jerk. But you have to understand that if I ever threw away a winning lottery ticket, and later realized it, I would DIE. It’s just not something I would get over. I cringe as I imagine the things people would say to me about how it just wasn’t meant to be, or how things happen for a reason, blah blah. If someone redeemed my winning ticket I would know exactly where I stand, karmically speaking, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

So, I will continue to manually (and therapeutically) shred tickets. Pay stubs, bills, anything that contains my social security number or other pieces of information useful in the stealing of my identity- those can go wholly into the trash. But not my lottery tickets. NEVER my lottery tickets.

The fact that my home refinance is headed for disaster is not surprising, considering the complete lack of forethought that went into this endeavor. What is irritating, though, is the feeling that I got hosed by the appraiser.

I don’t consider myself a friendly person. I’m not particularly outgoing or social. But, I put on a good face. I guarantee you that the people I know who drive me nuts have no idea how I actually feel. I expressed this to a co-worker once and he looked at me curiously. I could tell he was wondering what I really thought of him. So I calmly reassured him that I did, without a doubt, like him… but if I didn’t he would never know.

I guess it was the anti-dog thing that rubbed me so wrong that I just didn’t care enough to make the home appraiser think I liked her. I exchanged no pleasantries. I cracked no jokes. I stood by and watched when she took her shoes off by my front door, even though I don’t care if people wear shoes in my house, and in fact, recommend it based on the extreme dustiness of my finished basement. Nope, instead I just alternated between packing my lunch and huffily locking up dogs. I was noticeably irritable, at best. Downright surly, at worst.

The appraiser showed me. The appraisal came back $10K less than I needed in order to make the loan work. My credit score is through the roof, and I have never been late on a mortgage payment. It would seem to me that since I can afford my current payment, I can certainly afford one $200 lower. But banks are picky these days, and logic does not appear to be a factor in the decision making process.

Now, my easy, quick refinance is a bit more complicated. I have to go out on my own and find evidence that my home was low-balled. If I provide this information to the bank, and they accept it, the loan process can continue. If they don’t revise the appraisal (and they said they rarely do), I either have to lower the amount of the loan (which is impossible. I need to finance the whole amount. If I had thousands of dollars lying around, would I even be going through this process?), or I walk away and lose my non-refundable application deposit.

I am certain that this situation will resolve itself in a satisfactory manner. These things just have a way of working out, and I am nothing if not lucky. (Yep, still trying to work the “positive thinking” angle. Question: how long does it usually take the universe to notice this optimistic bull shit and alter my cosmic path accordingly?)

Tags: Home refinance

I am in the middle of a somewhat hastily arranged home refinance. I don’t know what made me think about refinancing, but the idea popped into my head while at work one day so I went online and looked at exactly one mortgage option from exactly one bank. I filled out an application and according to my calculations, if it all goes through my monthly payments will be about $200 less a month. Of course, my calculations are hardly ever correct. And if I take after my mom, who went through a refinance last year, I will somehow end up paying more than I do now.

One of the items on the long and irritating list of tasks that have to be completed before this deal is wrapped up is to get the home appraised. Because I am always looking for an excuse to work from home, I arranged for the appraiser to come by my house this morning, despite her repeated attempts to schedule it for Sunday afternoon. I had really, really wanted to clean the house over the weekend. I thought it was important to get it all shiny and sparkly to try to make up for the tiny blemish on the bathroom shower wall:

But I didn’t clean. The thing about cleaning, is that it sucks. It sucks in general and sucks most of all on weekends. So, as the appointment time for the appraisal drew near and I looked around my messy house, my head filled with dread and shame. When the appraiser arrived, though, my feelings changed.

She knocked on the front door which (rightfully, if you ask me) caused Riley and Sigh to bark and approach the door. When I opened the door a crack, the appraiser immediately commanded me to lock the dogs in a room, and refused to come in until I did so. And I can understand why. I mean, have you ever seen anything more terrifying than this:

So for the duration of the appointment, I had to shuttle the dogs from room to room (the appraiser waited outside on the porch during each of the relocations) while she did her assessment. I don’t trust people who don’t like dogs, even though this lady claims that she is only skittish because she was attacked by a dog a few weeks ago. As the inconvenience of dealing with this woman grew, I found myself caring less and less about the disastrous state of my home. In fact, I was more than a little pleased when she turned to leave the house and I noticed that a rather large tumbleweed of dog fur had attached itself to the back of her black pant leg. Serves her right for making my dogs prisoners in their own home (but I hope she didn’t notice it until after she wrote and submitted my appraisal).

Tags: Home refinance, Riley, Sigh