risky business

As I was picking up a rental car this week to drive while my car is repaired there was some delay in getting the car. I was left to contemplate why the car rental business is not a good business.

1. A large percentage of a car rental place's business is people who were just recently in an accident. Even if they are not at fault, they have established that they are not perfect at protecting their vehicles. I have to include myself in this number.
2. People renting cars are not likely to be used to the nuances of the car they are renting. For example, I am renting an Accord. The gas and brake are significantly more sensitive than Golden's Protégé, which I had been driving for the prior two weeks.
3. People who rent cars are less likely to be careful with them than if they owned them. I have heard a few people say that they drive rentals harder than they drive their own cars. It would make sense that this would be true.

I know that, ultimately, the customer is responsible for insuring the cars they are renting. Even so, it would seem like a risky business leasing out vehicles to people who are more likely than average to not bring them back in one piece.

bathroom solitude

I prefer that when I visit the bathroom that the fewest possible people are there. I can deal with other people in the bathroom, but solitude is the ideal.

Since my office is on the path that most of the people at my work have to take to get to the bathroom, this provides me a distinct advantage in choosing when to take a break. While this is generally a positive, I have noticed that people walk by my office a lot. More than once I have stood up to visit the facilities, and in that split second someone strolled by my door in the same direction that I want to go. When this happens I usually decide to hold it a little while longer.

Also, some of the people in the office do not have to walk by where I sit to get to the restroom, so if I figure out that more than one person is already in the bathroom or headed to the bathroom before I get there, I typically turn around and come back later.

I know this is a little quirky, but it is how I operate.

business hours

Today, along with my normal work requirements, I have to go to the doctor's office and a car rental place. At some point I need to stop by the bank to fill out an unauthorized charge claim as well. What frustrates me is that, for all of these things, I either have to take time off work or have to rush around immediately after work to take care of them.

With the accident and my recent health issues and everything else going on lately, I have had to make a few phone calls during work time to address non-work issues. I hate having to do that, but there has been no choice. If insurance people and car repair shop people are only available during office hours, I am left with little choice.

I don't understand why a lot of places are only open when most people are at work. Most restaurants couldn't stay in business if they were only open weekdays from 9 to 5, but doctors, banks, and countless other businesses successfully do it.

A lot is made of banker's hours, but I can't disagree. If any bank ever decided to stay open until 9PM rather than until 6PM, I would have to think that it would get spectacular business. The schedule alone would make it stand out from the competition.

If I were a banker, that would have to be a money making idea. Of course, if I were a banker I probably would want to be able to work banker's hours.

special day

Tomorrow is Golden's birthday. Last year I had a class scheduled on her birthday. That was unintentional and unfortunate. This year, I did not schedule any classes that would require me to be gone on her birthday. This has not caused things to happen that can distract from her special day.

Sunday morning I went to the emergency room for sharp pains in my stomach. This is related to the problem I was experiencing a few weeks ago, but the numbers of foods that sets me off has increased since then. They think I have a problem with my gall bladder, so I need to get that tested. This, along with dealing with my car and schoolwork, all threatens our ability to properly celebrate Golden's birthday.

As I was sitting in the hospital room in a hospital gown I contemplated how fortunate I was to have Golden. She did not complain or question the wisdom of going to the emergency room and she kept me company while we were there. We both got laughs at the same things yesterday, like trying to figure out why the doctor had to ask me whether I had a family history of ovarian cysts and how there is no such thing as maintaining your modesty when you are a hospital patient.

Golden, I do hope that you have a happy birthday. I love you!

death and...

Just about everyone who has to pay taxes doesn't like it. To work for the IRS is to beoome a pariah in some circles. I am starting to think that I like the American tax system as it is right now, though.

I have already mentioned this, but the first full year that Golden and I were married we did not fill out our W-4 forms to take into account our differences in salary, so we found that we owed the government quite a bit of money when we filed our taxes that year. Since then we have withheld a lot more money for taxes, and we have gotten nice returns for the past few years.

I used to kind of feel like the tax system was structured to be out to get me. Now I don't feel that way. This is largely because in the first few years of our marriage Golden and I did not have much going for us to lower our tax bill besides some student loan interest. I am definitely not complaining, but the system as it currently is forces those without kids, school bills, and mortgages to subsidize those of us who do have kids, school bills, and mortgages.

The way the system currently is does make some sense. If people have kids they are likely to have less money available to pay taxes than someone without kids. Generally speaking, Americans view home ownership as a good thing, so the associated tax benefits are at least predictable. Finally, education can have a long-term positive impact on the economic prospects of the country. I just would not like it if I were the person providing the subsidy. I am much happier receiving it.

As this is an election year, taxes are probably going to be talked about a lot. Since Golden and I are in a tax bracket that all of the serious candidates are targeting (which is really every tax bracket besides the very top and the very bottom), I do not expect that my taxes will be raised much in the near future. Even with a slight possibility, though, I am a little concerned. I really don't want the gravy train to end.

musical guilty pleasures

I have been meaning to post on this for a while, but I haven't gotten around to making a list that I felt covered the gamut. After reading Forrest's post on musical artistry, though, I decided that it is a good time to list a few of my musical guilty pleasures.

First, I have a few rules. Some music that I like that would be considered a guilty pleasure by someone else, but I would not consider it a guilty pleasure for myself. I have two qualifying factors for whether I consider something a guilty pleasure. I have to like the music in question enough that I can't fool myself into thinking otherwise, and I have to be genuinely embarrassed about it.

Now, on to displaying what I have to be embarrassed about.

"I Will Survive" (Gloria Gaynor)
I figure I'll start with what I think is the most shocking of my guilty pleasures. There is no reason that I should like this song. It is not targeted to me. That does not stop me from loving (and, ashamedly, that is the right verb) how the song slowly builds tension until the chorus. I can't help but get sucked into this one.

Just about anything by Creed
By rights this should not be here. I am not always embarrassed to admit that I like Creed. There are so many people who think that this band was the worst thing that happened to music in the late 90s, though, that I have to hesitate before confessing that "Higher" is among my favorite songs.

Josey and the Pussycats
Golden nonchalantly listed this as my top guilty pleasure once. Specifically, I like the theme to the movie that came out a few years ago. I never actually saw the movie, but I do like the song.

"These Boots Were Made for Walking" (Nancy Sinatra)
The Nancy Sinatra version is the only one I can recall. I don't know what else to say.

Michael W. Smith
I have to work him in here, but I am not sure how to do it. There are specific songs of his that I like and I am embarrassed about it ("Give it Away"). There are specific songs of his that I like and am not embarrassed about it ("Secret Ambition"). There are songs of his that I simply don't like (anything in the last fifteen years).

I'm sure there is more that I can't think of right now, but this is enough to reveal for the moment. So, do you have any guilty pleasures as well?

there's the rub

For a long while I have had a dark secret. I don't understand Shakespeare at all. This probably would not be a big deal to most people, but throughout the years I have realized that books and movies that I have liked have been heavily influenced by him. It irritates me that whoever wrote the book or movie is able to get something valuable out of a work that sounds to me to be gibberish.

For example, a very famous passage from Hamlet is here. It bothers me deeply that I have to read and reread this passage to understand what he is saying, and I still am not sure I fully get it. I think this is about being too cowardly to commit suicide, but I am not certain. Am I the only one?

I started thinking about this recently when I was talking with Golden about when I started studying the Bible. Around the time I turned fourteen I got an NIV study bible and for the first time I understood what I was reading. Prior to this the only bibles I had were of the King James variety, which sounds very much like Shakespeare. I rarely understood anything that I read in the Bible up to that point. While I am sure that a lot of this was because I was a kid, most of it had to do with the fact that I naturally have a hard time understanding Old English.

After I got my NIV I was often glued to my Bible because I could understand large portions of it for the very first time. It is for this reason that I am not particularly fond of the King James Version. If I can't follow it, I don't see the purpose.

As always, it is possible that I doth protest too much.

february

I always kind of joked that I was asking for trouble in marrying someone who was born in February. I need to make sure to remember two important days in such a short month. All that really was joking, though, because Golden is not difficult to please.

I have had other reasons to not like the month. I am always impatient for Spring while it is February because it is cold and because it is gray. There are few good movies that come out in February, and even before NJ it was always difficult to find something fun and different to do in this month. Did I mention it is cold and gray?

The last few years, though, I have really disliked the month of February. Since I went back to school I seem to have had the most schoolwork assigned in February of any month. I know this because I have not truly dreaded any month other than February. Every other month has felt manageable, even when I was busy. Getting through February, though, has simply been a matter of survival.

This year is not much different. I am ecstatic that the month is more than half over. I can't wait for March. My life begins again in March.

buy low, sell high

It seems stupid to have to give a disclamer about this post, but I am giving some investment advice. As always, you make your own financial decisions. Even good advice can be improperly followed. I do completely stand behind the principle that this is stellar advice for anyone who is not planning to retire for more than ten years.

This is a post that will probably bore most people, so that is why I saved it for the weekend. I feel that what I have to say is important to note, though, because it could ultimately save some people thousands of dollars, so I decided that I should post it at some time. Also, for those people who understand some of the basics about investing, this will probably not be anything new.

I am taking an investments class right now. More than actually teach me about investments, it has reinforced some beliefs that I already have. You can't analyze a company and just know that it is going to do well based on number crunching. You have to get lucky. You can improve your odds, though, by not going after whatever happens to be ridiculuously popular at the moment, because it is almost certainly extremely overpriced. You cannot find winners by looking at the financials of companies, but you can often eliminate losers.

I do not pretend to know a lot about investing. I have already made my share of mistakes. I have learned from those mistakes, though, and I have observed other people making mistakes, so there are a few things that I do know.

Most people anymore have a defined contribution retirement plan. The good thing about this is that if someone moves around jobs, that person can roll their 401(k) or 403(b) into an IRA and not receive any penalty for not being in a company pension plan for a set number of years. There are a lot more bad things about this, though.

People now have the option of cashing out their retirement plan when they change jobs, which is usually not good at all (though I admit it is sometimes necessary). People are now limited to whatever investment options are available in their retirement plan. People are also now typically responsible for making investment decisions within their plans. My observation is that a lot of people are not equipped to handle this task.

There are a lot of economists who believe that we are currently in a recession. This is possible. The stock market has certainly dropped in the last six months. The last recession I went through I observed some otherwise very intelligent people make unwise moves in their retirement plans. One person in particular told me that after losing so much of the value of his plan due to the market downturn he moved all of his retirement investments from stock funds to bond funds. This may sound like a good move after losing money, but it is essentially the equivalent of selling low and buying high.

This may sound arrogant, but I am about to give you perhaps the most important investment advice you will ever hear. If you are more than ten years from retirement and are contributing to bonds in your retirement account right now stop doing this and invest in stock funds (preferrably index funds). If the stock market goes downhill for an extended period of time, this is the best thing in the world that can happen to someone who has a retirement plan where he or she contributes only to stock funds and plans to not sell the funds any time soon. That person gets to buy the stock funds at a discount every single pay period for the stretch while the market is suffering. It is the equivalent of buying low and selling high.

So to reiterate my advice, it is this. So long as you are not going to retire in the next five or ten years, a recession is not the time to get out of stocks in your retirement plan. It is the time to get in. In the long run your odds are very good for having more money than you otherwise would have had for retirement.

v-day

I have given some thought lately to the fact that little changes in the things that happen in life lead to completely different outcomes in the long run. Even with this thought, I cannot imagine life without Golden, nor do I want to.

Part of my foundation of why I believe in God is that so much of the random stuff in my life actually makes some sense when I look back at it. I do not always know why everything that has happened in my life has happened, but it must have been necessary for me to be at my current stage of life with Golden and NJ.

I love you, Golden! Happy tenth Valentine's Day!

jarts

For some strange reason, we were discussing lawn darts at work a few days ago. This brought back some memories. It also reminded me of some questions that I have always had about why I had the opportunity to have memories of lawn darts.

My grandparents had a set of lawn darts that all of the grandkids played with when we were growing up. I don't know how many countless games we played, but it was more than just a few. Not only that, this was when we were anywhere from five to twelve years old. We were probably not as responsible with the game as we should have been since we were so young.

I do not know why we were allowed to play the game. None of our parents were uncaring or in the least bit permissive. Our grandparents were even more cautious. I guess no one really conceptualized that the game could be more dangerous than any other outdoor activity.

My experience with Jarts ended one day when my cousin tried to throw a dart over my sister's head and miscalculated. She was struck near her eyebrow, but she was not seriously wounded. It shook everyone up enough that it was the last time we played the game. I think the set got thrown out immediately. I do know I never saw it in the house after that day.

Given that experience, it actually perplexes me that someone ever thought this game was a good idea. I know it originated in an era that was not as litigious as society is now, but in retrospect it was probably a bad idea to design a game in which children hurl metalic missiles at a target near where their opponents are standing.

Lawn darts were actually banned for sale within the United States in 1988, probably due to other experiences where victims were not as lucky as my sister.

Back to my discussion at work, we found a place that apparently sells lawn dart parts to individuals in the United States under the assumption that selling parts gets through a loophole in the Consumer Product Safety Board's rules. I have some moral issues with someone doing this, but at least the people buying the game know what they are getting into. If they don't I hope they do not get the opportunity to learn the hard way.

I do have to offset my overly cautious side, though, with an observation. In it's defense, the game was a whole lot of fun.

crash pictures

Since I typed a relatively long post over the weekend, I am just going to provide some pictures of my car after the accident (that I posted about over the weekend). Looking at these pictures, the car does not actually look that bad. It was a little sickening to see right after it happened, though, so I have probably talked up the damage a bit more than necessary.

The first picture illustrates that the damage is not obvious from all angles. The other two pictures are where I got hit and where I struck the person in front of me.



I took the car in today to have it looked at and I was told that it would take a couple of weeks until all of the parts are in. I will keep the car until then. That is great, but since I don't fully trust the car at the moment, I am still driving Golden's car.

crash

On Thursdays I have a class that starts at 7:10PM, so I can go home and have supper with Golden and NJ after work and before I go to class. This is one of the things that I really like about this particular class.

As I was headed home last Thursday I approached a section of highway that is frequently congested. For those who know the stretch, it is where Highway 69 crosses College Blvd and I-435 nearly at the same time, so there is a lot of merging traffic. There is a bend on Highway 69 right before the College Blvd exit from the south, so when there is a lot of traffic it can be hard to tell how much the cars ahead have slowed down. This is not something that most people would think about if they were on this highway unless they saw it for themselves.

When I came around the bend I saw that traffic had stopped. My heart leaped into my throat as I hit my breaks, but I calmed down as I realized that I would be able to stop in time. I came to rest probably just short of a car length from the Jeep in front of me. Not perfect driving, but I was satisfied that I had not caused an accident.

I pondered that for a second or two before I realized that maybe the vehicles behind me would have the same problem that I did. I glanced in my rear-view mirror barely in time to see a desparately breaking SUV that was about to plow into me. I had just enough reaction time to brace before I was smacked in the back and pushed into the Jeep in front of me.

There were four cars in the "pile up," and all the drivers got out and instead of talking to each other made quick phone calls on their cells. I was struck (pun intended) with how no one really did anything until they had a chance to call someone. My call was to the police.

Of all of the vehicles in the accident, mine was the only one that suffered much significant visible damage. I had been pushed into the tire of the Jeep in front of me, so my hood is all bent up, but the only thing that I saw that was wrong with the Jeep was that the tire cover was a little torn. My back bumper is crumpled, but the only problem I saw with the vehicle behind me was a cracked license plate cover.

At first, the lady in front of me acted irritated that I hit her. After she had time to look over all of the damage she commented that I had probably stopped in time and the person behind me probably pushed me into her. It had not occurred to me that she had not realized that from the start. She was very nice after that.

The police arrived about fifteen minutes after the accident, took statements and pictures, and blocked off a lane of traffic. The police officer who was taking statements seemed sympathetic to my situation since I took the most damage and was not at fault. I have not yet seen the actual police report, but the biggest reason I wanted them there was as evidence that I did not actually cause the accident. That said, I do feel for the two women behind me as they were at fault.

I will be dropping my car off at the auto body shop on Monday so they can send the insurance company an estimate. The car looked bad at first because the hood is crumpled, but I only really see damage to the hood and to the rear bumper. I am hoping that is as far as the damage goes, since I do not want my car totalled.

Thankfully, no one had obvious injuries. I did feel sore in my neck yesterday, but that appears to be going away today. This really could have been a lot worse than it was, so I should be thankful.

i know it

Something that concerns me when I talk to people is that they think I am mocking them. The reason that this concerns me is that I have a tendency to pick up on other people's idiosyncrasies and imitate them, albeit unintentionally. If I talk to someone with a southern accent by the time I finish the conversation I am fighting the urge to elongate my vowels. If I talk to someone who stutters, I have to resist stutters more than usual. If I talk with someone who uses a word or phrase a lot I have the urge use it as well.

I have observed this last tendency a lot in myself and in others. My father-in-law uses the phrase, "I know it," when he agrees with what someone is saying. Since I have been with Golden I do the same thing, though not as much as I did a few years ago.

I think that I subconsciously want to imitate others to indicate that we are on the same level. I do not know this for sure, but that is usually something that is important to me when I am conversing with someone else. It could also just be a dumb physical reaction to listening to someone else talk.

dressed for success

One of the things that I appreciate the most about my job is that the environment is casual. I get to wear jeans and t-shirts every day.

On Monday I found out that a couple of senior executives in my company would be visiting my office to meet with my group specifically. So, I made the decision to get kind of dressed up. I wore black jeans, a button-up shirt that I tucked in, and I did not wear tennis shoes. This is more casual than the typical office worker, but it made me the most formally dressed in my office.

After I took some flak for my attire I found out that the executive visit was cancelled. In my mind this can mean only one thing. It had to be a ploy to make me more presentable for an entire day. I'll know better the next time.

fork vs spoon

I have been busy on non-blog stuff this weekend, so I don't have too much to say. I just have a question about how you eat your food.

Over the past few years I have noticed that Golden and I frequently pick different utensils to eat certain things. For example, she uses a fork for ramen and I use a spoon. I know there are other differences, but I cannot think of them right now.

A lot of the foods where there may be debate over the proper utensil can be eaten with a spork as well. I question who would actually want to do this, though. There are few things more annoying than trying to use the tines on a KFC spork. Either just using a spoon or a fork is usually a better option.

My question is what utensil do you use to eat the following foods if you do actually eat them?

1. Ramen
2. Beef Stew
3. Cole Slaw
4. Mashed Potatoes
5. Chocolate Mousse
6. Grapefruit
7. Ravioli
8. Corn (or peas or similar vegetables)
9. Jello Fruit Mold
10. Macaroni and Cheese

truth or dairy

Tonight is now the third night this week that I have had some severe pains after eating dairy food. I went to the doctor's office on Thursday and he thought it was the early stages of gastroesophageal reflux disease. He told me I should just avoid eating after 10 PM.

I am starting to think this is more severe than what the doctor thinks it is. Maybe I have developed lactose intolerance or a milk allergy? I do know that I will be avoiding milk products a lot more in the near future than I have been. I am thinking about testing some of those pills they make for the lactose intolerant.

I stopped by a drug store on the way back from the doctor's to pick up the generic versions of Mylanta and Gas-X. When I went through the checkout the lady asked how I was doing in a happy voice. I wondered how it was not obvious based on the products I was purchasing as I responded, "Fine," in a happy voice.

I hope that I can be more sincere about that response in the near future.