Bills

I don’t understand how people carry so much debt and so many bills without going insane. I haven’t been the most fiscally responsible person, but at least I never dug my hole so deep I couldn’t get out with little more than minor sacrifice.

I absolutely hate owing money. Carrying debt on a high interest credit card is horrible, as I well know. Twice now I’ve maxed and paid off my card, which has an awesome 30.2% APR. Damn. When I got the stupid thing I didn’t really intend to use it… unfortunately my planning was, well, optimistic at times and the credit card bridged the gap to the tune of several hundred dollars in interest payments lost.

I’m not totally out of the woods yet: I still owe a couple hundred on my military STAR card (more poor planning, yay!), and I owe the .gov about $1300 from a student loan I’m still paying off. I can defer that when I go back to college I believe, so I’ll probably just pay the minimums for now until I’m settled and sure I can afford to finish paying it then.

Once this debt is gone, I shall incur debt only in the form of student loans and other major things… credit card debt is absolutely foolish and only justifiable in dire emergencies. If you’re taking out loans to pay your bills or carrying balances on your cards, your doin it wrong.

Do the math. It’s shocking how much money you can lose to interest payments. Oh, and don’t get me started on overdraft charges!

I should be debt free (ignoring the student loan) by the end of February, unless my Jeep commits suicide. That will be a good day indeed.

Fucking Microsoft

I used to play Call of Duty 4 on XBOX Live a lot. Now that I haven’t even touched a 360 in three months, I just realized I’m still paying for my XBOX Live account. See, I completely paid off my credit card and I signed onto my bank website to feel good about that when I saw $8.63 on the fuckin card that hasn’t left my wallet in three months.

That’s $27 I won’t see again, and now it turns out that I can’t even cancel my subscription online! What the fuck, over?

That’s Microsoft all over: make it 100x easier to sign up than to cancel, then all kinds of antisocial suckers will just keep paying rather than pick up the phone and deal with Apu. Awesome customer service, pricks.

And now, of course, my other bank’s website is running as fast as a one legged turtle when I just want to pay my auto insurance bill… Christ on a pogo stick. Algore clearly should have done a better job when he invented the tubes.

Car stuff

Well I’m back to selling the Wrangler again. It sucks, but as it turns out I don’t have much choice due to the financial realities of my situation. Sigh.

My Cherokee is doing strange things again. It seems it’s a common problem with the AMC 242 engine for the number 3 cylinder to go dead if you start the car a few minutes after shutting it off, after reaching operating temperature. That gives you a really rough idle and low power until the cylinder catches again, which I can usually get to happen simply by slowing opening the throttle until about 3000 rpm and letting it back down.

I’m not 100% certain why that happens, but from what I’ve read it has to do with the heat of the engine causing fuel vapor to form in injector #3, clogging it for 20-30 seconds until it can clear. I only notice it happening when my engine start-temperature is 220 degrees.

Operating temperature is 195-210 (mine runs at 210), 220 is the highest with a proper cooling system in high-load or low speed operation, and 240 degrees can seriously shorten your engine’s lifespan. If you were wondering, that is.

The fix is to make insulating sleeves for the injector. I’m planning on wrapping my exhaust in heat wrap anyway to reduce the intake manifold and engine bay temperatures, so that will probably take care of it. It’s not a huge problem, but it can’t be good for the engine to be running unbalanced even for 20-30 seconds. In the meantime, no more starting the engine when it’s at 220 degrees. I can wait a few minutes instead.

Jaded

A couple years ago I realized how jaded I’d become. I didn’t like it.

There’s so much beauty and wonder in this world, and it’s really sad how many people walk through it all, taking it for granted, never seeing it.

Since then I’ve made an effort to fight back. I want to feel the wonder of childhood again. I’m getting there, slowly.

Phantom

I’m listening to the original Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, the Andrew Lloyd Weber version anyway, with Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford.

This is the version I first heard, and this is the way I feel it should sound. When I fall in love with a particular interpretation of a piece, I never enjoy other performances of the same piece quite as much. Since I was involved in several musicals in high school (in the pit), the professional versions sound totally wrong to me. Strange.

It applies to orchestral music as well: I have this certain impression of what Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons should sound like, but each movement was performed by a different orchestra. Reason being, when I first heard them all together, they were in MP3 form, not off a CD or in a live performance all at once.

I don’t remember what my impressions were when I first saw Phantom at Pantages Theater in Toronto. About all I remember from that was: needing binoculars to see clearly because I didn’t have glasses yet and getting blinded for about five minutes when the flames burst up; my sister getting sick and leaving early with my dad; and seeing homeless people for the first time in the city. I saw Phantom again later, in Rochester, in a much smaller theater, but I remember even less about that performance.

The last show I saw was Spamalot, on mid-tour leave from Iraq. My sister was really jealous of that, because she’s a huge Monty Python fan, but I had no idea what it even was before I got there. Obviously if I knew it was a stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail I would have gotten my sister a ticket too! Ah well. There sure was a lot of homoeroticism in that show, I must say. I wonder why they went that way from the movie? Who knows. It was pretty fuckin funny.

If you like satire and Phantom, you should probably read Terry Pratchett’s book Maskerade. Good stuff.

Part two.

So I found out why people were in here, and I’m even more pissed off now. Apparently they’re going through everyone’s barracks while they’re in California for some bullshit that has to do with moving to new barracks buildings.

My buddy who is back from training for an emergency with his girl tells me they went in everyone’s rooms, which means not only did they come in my house, but more than likely into my actual room as well. Key or not, they were breaking into all the rooms. My house door was left unlocked for at least 6 hours.

So lemme get this straight. Something is SO IMPORTANT that it’s perfectly fine to break into all the barracks without even telling anyone that lives there, leave houses unlocked, and fuck up my shit. You know what that important thing is? Neither do I, but it involves some civilian woman as well as two fucktards from my section.

It’s not like I’m hard to find during the day. I sit in the exact same spot for 8 hours straight every day.

Good thing I’m probably going to have to take $50-100 off the Jeep doors I’m selling thanks to this incident. I’m a bundle of fucking joy, let me tell you.

The padlock is ready for tomorrow. I’m only keeping half the locking bar deal on the door while I’m in here, because obviously I don’t want someone being a smartass and padlocking my door while I’m in here. It probably won’t stay on there long term, but at least until the first time someone has to come get me to get in here. Since telling them to stay the fuck out without me isn’t enough, I’m hoping that will bring the lesson home.

Just wow.

So today after my shift was over, I came back to my barracks to find it was unlocked. Not only that, but a bunch of my expensive stuff was moved around and my roommate’s door exposed. Oh, and my entire door was blocked, which was where my expensive stuff was moved to. Blocking my door.

Nothing is missing, so you know what that means? That means my jackass leaders came in here without my permission for the THIRD TIME, moved and damaged some of my very expensive auto parts for no legitimate reason, didn’t even do what they were supposedly in the house for, and then left my door unlocked to boot!

That’s game over in my book. I have an easy $4000 worth of stuff in the kitchen right now, which I was fine with because my house is never unlocked and the front door is the hardest one to break into, and they just left my house unlocked for anyone to come in and steal my shit.

For one thing, you’re not supposed to be in a soldier’s barracks without his knowledge and presence. For another, you’re sure as fuck not supposed to mess with his stuff without his knowledge, presence, and permission. Lastly, you DO NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE UNLOCKED WHEN YOU LEAVE.

Why was my roommate’s door exposed? He lives there. His name is on the door. The door is locked and visibly sealed. Why would you need to get to the door? The only answer is to break into his room and reseal the door, since these NCOs have access to the sealing tape in question.

Now my response is simple. I’m going to put a padlock on my front door tonight, the disk kind you can’t cut with boltcutters. I’m going to see 1SG in the morning and make a complaint. If nothing happens, I’m going to probably call the MPs and take it to IG (inspector general). There is no excuse for what happened here, and just because nothing is missing doesn’t mean I’m going to let it go.

Three times fucktards came in here without my knowledge until after the fact, and I’m not taking that intrusion anymore. Game on, faggots.

UAF.

Apparently I should be all set to apply to UAF as long as I take the ACT soon. They’re open enrollment and work with prospective students as much as possible to get them in. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want in school right away–if you’re admitted on probation, you have to prove yourself, and I imagine it’s difficult to get into the engineering programs I’m interested in right out the gate.

I’m going through practice problems for the ACT online, and boy do I suck at math these days. It’s not so much that I can’t do it as I can’t remember how to solve a lot of problems. After all… it’s been seven years since I last took math, and that’s a long time to remember things like trigonometric functions and analytic geometry without using it. It’s all coming back quickly.

Whoo hoo, another thing to do from 0800-1600! I’m running out of movies…

Awesome.

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2009/01/long-range-pistol.html

Words… fail… oh there they are.

Via Breda, I found another example of .gov idiocy that just blows my mind.

This is the link to the news article she links to if you’re too lazy to find it.

If the law isn’t amended to solve this problem… just wow. Ya know, I went to the library all the time when I was a kid. Biked down there all by myself the whole 3 miles or so from my home to the village landing when I was still in freaking elementary school. I’m sure biking there by myself was more dangerous than the lead I absorbed from the books I read.

Yes, children should be cared for. But this smothering obsession with protecting every hair on their heads is ridiculous. Life is dangerous. You can’t remove every danger. Might as well just grow kids in bubbles until they turn 18 years old if that’s what you want.

I got hurt a lot as a kid. I think I only went to the emergency room once, when I clotheslined myself on a tennis net in the middle of goddamn winter at night and gave myself a concussion (seriously, who leaves the net up in winter?). That’s part of being a kid. I cut my head open really bad sledding (still have that scar), face planted in the gutter on my bike, lost a ton of skin on my arm while rollerblading, took a baseball in the mouth and almost lost teeth, fell down stairs, fell out of trees, gave myself nerve damage by slicing a large chunk of my finger off with a soda can, cut myself all the time with knives, got stung in the eye by a bee… I could go on. Oh, I forgot! I got hit by a car once too, on my bicycle! That was one of the better ones.

Got-damn it’s amazing I survived, huh? To listen to some of these nanny-government people today I should have died about fifteen times over. I even handled pure lead in the form of lead wire, pellets, and sinkers! Holy shit! I must be brain damaged! Am I even really writing this?! Am I really in a padded room somewhere from all the lead I handled as a kid?!?!?! zomg!!11

Jesus. This sort of thing makes me want to go live in a frickin cave until the world stops inflicting humanity on itself.