Exclamation Point

The beach house fund now has $150.00 in it!

Random Stuff with Links

Live in Atlanta? Want to "do stuff" but need to save money? There's a pretty awesome new website: Atlanta on the Cheap. After perusing it, I bookmarked it, and you might want to too. Free IMAX, cheap art, cheap show tickets and stuff. I was actually pretty impressed. The little box to the right of the blog posts has TONS of stuff in it.

Also, if you're into poring over loooong lists of completely random stuff in search of that perfect....forklift, exam table, laptop, or truck chassis? The (Atlanta) airport surplus website is here. You can bid on stuff and view it before buying. Interesting, if nothing else!

THIS is the coolest lamp ever. I totally want to make one (WITHOUT the fruit--my cats would probably hang themselves accidentally...the spastoids...).

And finally, someday I'm going to use this to plan a food-based road trip all over the entire US. It's a website that showcases "The most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." Sounds AWESOME. Also, yes, I do plan on making myself lose 50 pounds before starting this road trip and gaining it all back during, why do you ask?

Beach and Cars

I want to live at the beach someday. Husband and I decided that this is not just a pipe dream and that we are going to try with everything we have to live at the beach within ten years(we were discussing it at Amelia Island this weekend).

So I opened another savings account that will be called Beach House Fund. When husband gets a job after finishing school, we need to save $2500+ per month in order to move to the beach within ten years. Hopefully as the years go by we can save more than that because my income should increase at least a little.

However. I also want:
-Sway bars
-An exhaust system
-A short-throw shifter
-Eventually, new wheels
-etc....

So I have to decide if my car is going to be the main splurge in my life between now and then, or if I even have the money for that--all of it will have to go for the beach house for a while. I also have to decide if that takes precedence over other things that I like spending money on (home decorating, food, clothes). Of course, this is all with the understanding that I will do none of these things until I/we pay off consumer debt and fund a 6-month emergency fund and max out retirement savings. However, if large groups of my adoring friends and fans want to get together and buy me stuff that I want but won't buy for myself, you can start with these:

-front sway bar

-rear sway bar

My birthday is September 30. No autographs, but you can come watch me at autocross anytime!

I crack myself up.

Anyway, I apparently have some serious thinking to do about my priorities for money, and where my car fits into that relative to other things. Autocross (and fun cars in general) can either be a cheap hobby or a really, really expensive hobby. I have to decide if the fun is worth the payoff. I think for the swaybars and short shifter, eventually, it will be. Not sure about the other stuff.

I think it is a matter of stress relief, for me. Autocross is GREAT for stress relief...but it is very short term, whereas LIVING AT THE BEACH would be great stress relief ALL THE TIME. I need to balance my short term stress relief needs with the eventual long term stress relief of the beach. But I don't think I'll ever give up Autocross. I love it too much.

Hey, if any of you women ever want to learn how to work on your car, let me know! I'm decent at it, and love it, and would love to show you/teach you.

And finally, here's a tidbit from the Concours d'Elegance from this weekend. I love this little car, and would like to at least drive it someday.

Autocross!

I lessened my tire pressures somewhat from previous runs (41 psi front, 45 psi rear) and really liked the way they responded. I may need to increase the front a little though, and do 45 psi all around--i got a bit of scuffing on the sidewalls, but I think it was because of my half-spinout. Grin.

My first run, from a time perspective, was awful. 82 seconds-ish. BUT, it was smooth and I stayed on course.

Second run, much better, but half-spinout caused time to be 75 seconds.

Third and fourth run, got down to 69 seconds, which was pretty good for me. I was only a few seconds behind the really good people (still way behind the PRO classes, but that's ok).

Most importantly, I relieved a lot of stress, had a TON of fun, and cleaned out my adrenal system. Haha. Here are pics:










One poor guy didn't torque his lugnuts enough and lost a wheel and most of his studs...it was bad. But he had a good sense of humor about it at least.

Made it, this time

Work calmed down a bit. Also we are going to the beach this weekend (staying at a free condo!)

Now I just have to get through this semester of school...plodding through. Need to NOT procrastinate on the huge project. :/

I can take a summer class! So one in summer, one in fall and I'm DONE. DONE, DONE, ON TO THE NEXT ONE, --actually, no, more like on to the relaxation and house cleaning and cooking and having a life again. T-minus 9.5 months and counting!!!

Also I am eagerly awaiting our tax refund (= = instant 4 month emergency fund) and my graduation in December and Caleb's graduation (May 2010 ish, or maybe August or Dec 2010) and having a full-time husband. That will be weird. And awesome. It'll be like a spend-the-night party every night! Yay! (That's my goal at least, to make sure that we try to have as much fun as if I were in eighth grade again and getting to spend an entire week with my BFF or something. At least half the time). For the first time since I started grad school, I am excited about my life again. (Never mind the fact that I am excited about life AFTER December; I'm just really amazed that I have ANY excitement at all). There IS a light at the end of the tunnel, and the sheer blackness has been replaced by a medium shade of gray. Just gotta keep plugging.

ARRRRRGH

My job is killing me.

Short version: everyone thought it would be a good idea if EVERYONE put in extra hours every week. (So we could bid more jobs at a slightly cheaper price, procuring more work and earning more money but paying everyone the same)....but then our sales people thought it would be a good idea to make promises that may or may not be possible to keep, and my team's "extra hours" have doubled/tripled depending on which person you are on our team. I am severely lacking in sleep and homework time (and time to cook, clean, do laundry, fix my car, wash my car, etc). So I've been spending more money on food since I have no time to make any, I'm never home, my house needs cleaning, I have no clothes to wear (except that wonderful hubby did enough laundry to get me through this week), my test grade suffered, I'm tired all the time, and still I get bitched at because it's never enough. I want to move to Europe sometimes. Fuck capitalism.

It's been so bad I broke out the Alanis Morissette CD and have been scream-singing at every opportunity. I am ANGRY.

However, there is an autocross this weekend, and I cannot WAIT. Sweet stress relief, here I come. My car is getting new spark plugs and some other 60k stuff on Saturday, so it will be feeling wonderful come Sunday morning. I haven't decided if I'll blast Foo Fighters (the usual autocross music) or Alanis on Sunday....hahahahaha.

Hearing and its Discontents

Sometimes I wonder if I hear things the way everyone else does, even with my hearing aids. Once, I made someone wear one of my hearing aids and asked if it sounded different than normal hearing, and of course the answer was yes. Granted, this is probably because I hear worst at high frequencies and thus the aids turn up the sounds on those more than low ones, hence to a normal hearing person, they would sound pretty atrocious. I have enough “real” hearing to be able to listen to my radio in my car at a medium high volume (sans hearing aids) and actually hear it. And headphones (for which I remove the aids) sound basically the same as music from a radio with the hearing aids in. But I still wonder if I process the sound in the same way, if it sounds different to hearing people, and if I'm missing some wonderful sounds, or if other people are missing wonderful sounds--maybe the things that sound like pure heaven to me are just sounds to others...I will never know. The only time it really irritates me is when I am not wearing my hearing aids and desperately want to hear what someone is saying (swimming and immediately upon waking or showering).

There are, however, numerous advantages.

Anytime I don't want to hear something, I simply press a button and the hearing aids "go dark" while also acting as earplugs. This is very beneficial when it comes to sirens, squealing brakes, unruly children, etc. It also greatly reduces the urge to smack said children, which is good considering they aren't mine and I’m usually in public and don’t even know the kids.

When I press the button once, it goes to "telephone" mode, during which I can talk on a (land) line without having to remove them. I don't usually use it for phone conversations (I can hear well on phones and usually just take one out); HOWEVER, I recently discovered that with them on this setting, they pick up various electromagnetic (I'm assuming it's EM, anyway) noise, and I can hear motors and equipment--even if they are fairly far away. It's neat. Random thought: I wonder if, because of their electrical nature, they'd be wiped out in the event of large EM radiation or nuclear radiation? Maybe I should avoid the power plants....

I sleep REALLY WELL. I don't hear the bus going by every ten minutes or the loud cars or the rumblings of my elephant-like cats. I love sleep, so this is also a very good thing, unless I'm home alone and afraid of robbers (which, of course, is even worse now with the second break-in). Then I'm faced with the choice of leaving them in and sleeping like crap or taking them out and not hearing the potential thieves breaking in. I choose sleep and potential thieves most of the time, though I keep various weaponry and my handy alarm key fob with panic button basically under me while I sleep if the hubby isn’t there. Just in case.

My ears are never cold. In fact, I didn't realize how cold one's ears could get until I (for whatever unknown reason) was outside in the winter without the aids. I hightailed it back inside and put them in and was warmed. Whew.

Nothing is ever too loud. Most new digital hearing aids have compression built in, which is a fancy term for not transmitting loud noises beyond a certain loudness (i.e. they don't just magnify noise linearly. Yes I'm a dork). At first, this was bad, because the "loudness tolerance" for this particular brand was set extremely low, and anytime there was anything even resembling noise I would hear them actually masking it. It drove me nuts. So we adjusted some stuff and now they're great! *Note: this feature comes in extreme handy at concerts--my mom and sister's ears rang for three days after the last one and mine didn't at all.

The drawbacks, though...they are plentiful as well. 22 years with them has produced some doozies.

Somehow I always run out of batteries when on a trip somewhere when I'm not driving. This means I have to ask our hostess or whoever is driving to hightail it to a drugstore or Wal Mart ASAP, politely. But desperately. Because otherwise I WON'T BE ABLE TO HEAR ANYTHING.

Once, I flushed BOTH of them down the toilet accidentally. Don't ask. I dropped one into the (clean, empty) toilet once, too, prompting my mother to disallow them from the bathroom forevermore. Probably a smart policy given my...well...let’s just euphemistically say, “tendency toward blonde moments.”

Another time, I forgot them at home when going to school and my mom had to bring them to me. I was in kindergarten and had been wearing them for two years at that point. I'm still not sure how one manages to leave the house without being able to hear...

At a friend's house after a sleepover in fourth grade, we were playing with water guns. You guessed it, friend scored a direct hit to the ear and it wouldn't work anymore! I freaked, my mom arrived later to pick me up and instructed me to hold it in front of the A/C vent for a while and it was good as new. I think I thought that my friend did it on purpose (even though most of my friends didn't even know I had hearing aids, and if they did, probably wouldn’t have realized that water + hearing aids = very bad. And that was the very first time I had spent any time at that person’s house…she probably forgot they were even there). Apparently I was a little conspiracy theorist or something.

Still another time, my mom's cat decided that earwax was her absolute most favorite thing in the entire world, and I woke up and found that one of my “ears” was missing. It took my parents and me an hour of frantic we’re-gonna-be-late-for-school! searching to find it (on the floor, in the back of the closet)...and when I picked it up I realized it had been licked clean. GROSS. To this day I cannot leave them out at my parents' house or the cat will take them.

So there. Everything you never wanted to ask your friends who have hearing aids, in one (rather lengthy) post!

Smells

The new year came in with a vengeance--I had a week and a half off work, and then class and work both started up again on the fifth. I'm still trying to recover.

Anyway.

So I'm sitting in class last week (maybe the third day of class?) and all of a sudden, I'm sneezing. And I'm afraid I can't stop. During a lull, I am conscious enough to realize that I think it's the girl's perfume who is sitting beside me. Yikes. I inch to the left in my chair, hoping to escape the nostril-tingling fumes. No dice. I sneeze. My nose runs. My eyes water. Everyone else in the room is doing an EXCELLENT job of not noticing, including the professor, who is very carefully not looking at me. Or anyone, actually. Finally, I just turn my head. Ahhhhhhh, sweet relief. Eventually I inch far enough away to stop sneezing. I hope she didn't think she smelled bad...I have no idea how it actually smelled, only that it invaded my nose like an explosion of those little things you blow off dandelions in the summer. Fired into the nostrils via jet stream. That's never happened to me before. I hope it doesn't become a common occurence-- "Oh, hi, Mrs. X, it's nice to meet you!" (lean in for handshake, perfume causes nostril tingling, and Mrs. X now has snot all over her.....hmmm...this could be problematic).

So I resolve that I can't sit beside this girl anymore. Which in and of itself is problematic because she is the girlfriend of a friend of mine, and I don't want her to think I don't like her. But there are plenty of other seats, right?

Fast forward five days, same class. I get there late and have to take the remaining seat near the front. It's next to a guy I don't know. As soon as I sit down, I almost gag. My brain is going, "BODY ODOR BODY ODOR BODY ODOR BODY ODOR YOU HAVE TO MOVE. NOW, WOMAN!" I (stealthily, and without expressing the panic I feel, I hope) glance around and realize unless I want to cause a semi-major disruption, I can't change seats. So I practice the inching away technique some more and breathe through my mouth. (Seriously, people, it was the sour sweaty BO that you only get from BOTH exercising rigorously AND not showering for a few days). Then I sort of do this weird head tilt thing to aim my nostrils to my left while pretending I'm just trying to understand the professor (same one as before) better. I resolve not to sit next to this guy anymore either.

Then today, I get to class (late, again--well, late enough to not have much seat choice) and have to sit beside him again. I instinctively hold my breath. But then I (reluctantly, while breathing through my mouth) sit down and take a tentative whiff. Apparently, he has showered, though not recently, recently enough to not reek. I breathe a (small) sigh of relief and resolve to be very, very early to that class from now on.

Is there a "Supersmellers Anonymous?" Because I totally need that. This is just a small sample of what my poor poor nose goes through on a fairly regular basis. Based on this, I have decided when I get pregnant (in five or maybe ten years), I'm going to just have to hole up at home, not cook bacon, not wear perfume, not poop or have to smell it, and have something that still smells good to my pregnant, odor-revulsed selfnext to me at all times so that if I catch a whiff of something untoward, I can just smother my face with the smelly-good thing and NOT PUKE.

However, I would venture to guess that because I smell what most people don't (or smell it long before they do) I'm a supertaster and therefore food tastes better to me than most people. Which is good if you are my taste buds, but bad if you are my weight. Bad with the good, though, right?

I Need a Constant Reminder

Whenever I want to spend money, which is pretty often, I get this weird feeling--I get excited, soon followed by guilt over spending (especially now, with our budget stretched to the breaking point), then I have an internal argument over whether to actually do it or not. I usually have about a 50/50 chance of spending or not.

But I read this today: "You don't cut out things that you value," Rob said. "The most important thing (about spending money) is can you remember it? I vividly remember those trips years later." (from an interesting article on MSN Money). And it stuck...I am going to add this to my repertoire of things to say to myself when I think I want something. Because usually, purchases aren't memorable. Yay another step to Financial Independence!! Or something. We still have an astronomically long way to go, but I'm chugging along.

Awkward Question

A detective from the Police Department called me today, to ask if I could think of any reasons why I'd been burglarized twice in as many months...I said no.....

Because, how do I say, well, it's probably because I'm white (living in a very much non-white neighborhood) and because my house is the only rehabbed one on my block...?

And I don't have anyone home all day like most of my neighbors (they are either retired or have parents living with them or something)...

Argh.