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  • I gotta stop doing that

    I have this problem.

    When people say things, I decipher their meaning based on the common meaning of the words they use.

    For example, back in March we had a fence put in. We paid for treated wood (says so on the bill). We got treated wood (says so on the tags stapled to the wood).

    The fence warped, so I called the vendor to have it fixed. They just called me about it. the conversation went roughly like this:

    Vendor: Oh, it warped because the wood hasn’t been treated. You’ll have to pay for us to fix it.

    Me: But I paid for treated wood.

    Vendor: Yes, but….

    Me: Did I not get treated wood?

    Vendor: Well yes, but….water got in it because it’s not treated and….

    Me: You just said I bought–and you installed–treated wood. What, exactly, was it treated for?

    Vendor: I’m not sure…

    The end of it is that I have to pay for the labor to fix my in-warranty fence. I’m thinking about using an obscure definition of the word pay, since they didn’t clarify they wanted me to give them money instead of cover them with tar. 

    I still have no idea what the hell I bought when I paid for treated wood.

  • Aaaaand I’m back

    So here are the basic results of my experiment:

    • Blood pressure is consistently lower
    • I’m getting more tasks accomplished at work and at home
    • I’m less combative in general.

    That being said, it was a little weird the first time someone said to me “Hey, did you hear about [random thing on the news]” and I had to answer “No.” That’s abnormal for me.

    A huge bonus came about week 3. I realized that I had not seen or heard anything from Barack Obama, Harry Reid, or Nancy Pelosi in three weeks. That made me smile.

    I’m going to assume that Only Ones are still assholes, Democrats are still for Big Government, Republicans are still for Big Government That Grows At A Slightly Slower Rate, and the media is still lying about pretty much everything. Did any of that change?

    I’m going to ease back into it, but I really kind of liked not knowing what was going on. I mean, I have a vague idea of what’s going on with the “Occupy” protests, but it doesn’t enhance my life one bit to know that people who don’t have jobs, but do have smartphones, laptops, and tents, are protesting the fact that their degrees in women’s studies didn’t get them six figure jobs.

    BTW, what the hell happened to Rick Perry? He was the frontrunner when I stopped paying attention. And why does it seem to be a Romney/Cain race at this point? I got off the Cain Train when he said it was totally okay for local governments to ban religious orders they don’t like.

  • Baby Step 3: Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse

    Note before we begin: By the time you get here, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea for what works and what doesn’t in your household. This post is to provide guidance, not gospel.

    “When you are prepared for the zombie apocalypse, a hurricane is just a storm.”

    We’ve all heard that one, and it’s true. We like talking about the zombie apocalypse because it’s a very good way to talk about serious subjects without the buzzkill of reality. Hurricane prep isn’t fun, or sexy, anywhere near the front of your mind. You know you need to do it, but come hurricane time you’re in line buying plywood like everyone else who didn’t prepare. But Zombies? Now you’re talking!

    Baby Step 3 is the financial equivalent of preparing for zombies. If you are ready to have zero income from any source for 6 months, the AC in your house going out is a just minor inconvenience.

    After paying off everything except the first mortgage, Dave Ramsey’s recommendation is to stockpile 3-6 months of expenses. Since you’ve just finished your debt snowball, just consider this your last debt. Take that gigantic payment you were making on your student loan and start sending it to your money market account and you’ll be there in no time.

    So, three to six months of expenses, eh? Well, do I do 3? Or should I go the full 6? What if I want more than that?

    That’s up to you and your spouse. If you’re young and single, 3 months is probably okay. If you’re married with 2 kids and you’re the only one that works, 6 months may not be enough in the Obama economy. You probably don’t want more than 18 months worth of expenses sitting in an account getting (as of today) 0.9% interest, because really if you have to live on savings for more than a year you’re going to be looking at liquidating other assets anyway.

    Note that this is 3-6 months of expenses, not 3-6 months of income. Expenses would be defined as those reoccurring items that you need to survive, but you can extend that to keeping your standard of living. Contributions to savings, extra house payments, retirement, etc, would not be included in expenses. Cable, rent, utilities, and blow money would be. This is whatever you decide, but in my house it comes to be a little more than half of our take home pay (we’ve continued to keep a modest standard of living despite getting significant raises).

    If you’re married, the spouse that wants more money in this account wins! Let’s say you do the math and your monthly expenses are $2,000. Six months of expenses would be $12,000. You think you could get by with $10,000 but your wife says she needs $20,000 in the bank to feel safe. She wins! Now, if she said $100,000 then you’d have a case for her being unreasonable, so unless it’s something like that then just let it go.

    One thing to remember, though, is that Baby Step 3 MUST BE COMPLETE before moving to Step 4: Saving For Retirement! If you don’t have a house yet, you have to have your emergency fund fully funded before you can start saving for your down payment (Baby Step 3b)! Take these things into consideration when discussing how large your emergency fund should be. Your husband will probably settle for a smaller emergency fund if he realizes he’ll get a garage sooner by doing that.

    Having twenty thousand dollars(!) sitting in a bank earning monthly interest after having recently owed over forty thousand dollars plus monthly interest is an awesome feeling to have. I have things that keep me up at night, but money isn’t one of them. Like I said at the beginning, it turns what would be a major freakout level problem into a minor inconvenience.

    It turns a hurricane into just another storm.

  • Tragedy!

    Alternate title: Two is one, one is none.

    Not a good weekend to be my equipment.

    On Friday, one of the kydex belt loops for my Raven Concealment holster snapped while I was getting into my wife’s car. I’ve had that holster for three or four years, so I wasn’t really surprised.  Back in July I ordered some IWB clips to replace the OWB loops. I hadn’t received them yet (nor had my debit card been charged),  but that hadn’t set off any alarm bells since Raven is pretty famous for multi month backlogs.
    Long story short, they switched systems and lost my debit card info. They emailed me about it, but it went to my spam folder. I’ve now ordered again, including replacement OWB loops. Expected wait time is 2 weeks.

    Related to the holster failure was my Insight M6 getting jacked up. See, I carry my Glock with a light and laser. That’s why I got a Raven holster in the first place: at the time they were the only people who offered a holster for my particular combination. I went to my backup configuration, which consists of a Serpa* for the Glock and a Fobus holster for the light. The Fobus is basically a paddle with a rail on it.

    What I didn’t realize is that it is directional. You’re supposed to carry it lense up, because there’s a block that keeps the switch from engaging if you do it like that. Yeah, so apparently the light was on for about 45 minutes straight while I was in the car.

    Right now the laser-only option works, but anything involving the lamp doesn’t. I’m hoping it’s just that the batteries have enough juice for the laser but not the light, and not that I killed the lamp.

    *Yes, I know about the safety concerns, but it’s all I have for a backup holster.

  • Awesome

    Just got a call from my FFL.

    See, when I bought my suppressor back in July, I gave them the money for the tax stamp.

    Apparently, they forgot to send the money to the ATF.

    Perhaps I will handle that myself next time.

    Counter gets reset. Dammit.

  • Finding 100% gasoline

    As you know, my wife and I drive older cars. About a year ago, I had to have several hundred dollars of work done on mine to fix a seriously bad misfire problem. Rough idle is one thing, running rough at 70mph is an entirely different matter.

    As it turned out, the ethanol blends I’d been using had gummed up my fuel injectors (among other things) to the point where they had to be replaced. I had heard of this happening to cars that were older than my 1999 Jeep, but I was a bit surprised it happened to me. There are other benefits to running pure gas, such as better fuel economy, increased horsepower, and it makes Al Gore cry.

    So, what to do? How do you know where to get 100% pure gas?

    Pure-Gas.org has a crowdsourced list of gas stations that claim to have pure gasoline. Again, it’s crowdsourced, so it’s not a complete list. Sometimes gas stations switch to E10 or E15 blends, at which point you should update the list to remove them. I’ve been using that site for a while now to locate gas stations, especially while traveling. In fact, when I went to the LuckyGunner Blog Shoot I pre-planned a gas stop based on this list.

    (Just add this to the list of ways government intervention in markets is a real PITA.)

    Anyway, one of the features of that site is they provide a KML file for all the pure gas stations in the country. I wanted to make a web app that would plot your GPS position and this KML file so I could more easily find stations if I’m on the road. I spent about an hour whipping something up, and then found these instructions on how to, in a roundabout way, import the KML file to your mobile Google Maps application. Huge bonus for Android users: You can pick a station on the map and get voice navigation.

    SCORE!

    Here are the basics:

    1. Log in to maps.google.com with your Google account.
    2. Click on “My Places”
    3. Click “Create Map” (big red button)
    4. Click “Import” (link, above the title and the the right of the Done button)
    5. In the “Or enter the url of map data on the web” box, put http://pure-gas.org/temp/pure-gas.kml
    6. Hit Upload (you may have to hit enter first to get the Upload button to activate)
    7. Now, on your Android device, open the Google Maps application
    8. Click the Layers button
    9. Click “My Maps”
    10. Select the map you created

    My quick test reveals that not all stations are showing on my mobile maps app, though. I suspect there is a limit to the number of markers the mobile app can handle, so it just loads the nearest five hundred or whatever. I’m heading back to Atlanta in a few weeks, so I’ll be able to test it then.

    I also don’t know if this method will update your map with any changes to the KML file. I’ll have to check that out, too.

    If you don’t care about navigation, or that’s a wee bit too much work for you, I’ve got the location-aware version of the pure-gas.org map here. The work was done under the Creative Commons license.

  • Debt Free Living: But I Pay Mine Off Every Month! Edition

    One common excuse reason people give for keeping a credit card is that they pay it off every month, so it’s okay for them to keep it.

    I have never understood this logic. If you have the money to make all the purchases, why not just use the money instead of the credit?

    I covered this about two years ago and got some interesting responses, which I’d like to address again here.

    Reason #1: Credit cards are safer than debit cards
    This used to be true many years ago. MANY years ago. It hasn’t been true for more than a decade now, but people still believe this myth. Today, Visa and MasterCard provide the exact same protections to debit cards as they do to credit cards. EXACTLY the same. People go through some serious mental gymnastics to try to counter this simple fact, but it says it right there on their websites. It’s a lot like telling people that the Earth isn’t flat or that fire really can melt steel–no matter what evidence you show them, some people will simply refuse to believe it. Don’t be that guy, please!

    (One note, though: If the crook gets your PIN and card number, there are no protections. That’s also true of credit cards that allow cash advances, though. My advice is to always run your debit card as a credit card in case you run into a situation where the vendor is compromised and an attacker is collecting card numbers and PINs. Small chance, but it happens.)

    The difference, of course, is that when someone steals your debit card and uses it as a credit card, the money comes directly out of your account. About ten years ago someone stole my debit card and within 24 hours I got ALL my money back. If that happened to me today and I needed to make a purchase during that 24 hour period, I’d use the emergency fund. You would already have that before cancelling all your cards, remember?

    Reason #2: I get points/rewards/cash back for using a credit card
    Same goes for debit cards. Your bank may not offer rewards on debit cards, but if it’s important enough for you then all you have to do is switch banks.

    Reason #3: It keeps my credit score up
    So what? The only reason to have a credit score is to borrow money. Please understand there is a distinction between having bad credit and having no credit. As you pay things off and close accounts, your credit score will likely fall, but anyone who runs a credit check on you will see that it isn’t because you’re not paying your bills. Now, someone may try to bring up that with a low credit score you may have to pay a deposit on utilities, but that’s only true for a very narrow subset of the population. Basically for this scenario to be possible you would have meet all the following criteria:

    1. Enough of a credit history to have attained an acceptable score at one time.
    2. Closed enough accounts to make your score no longer acceptable.
    3. Not already doing business with the utility company, or had an account with them in the last year.
    4. Not transferring service from somewhere else

    For example, when I moved from one county to another, all I had to do to avoid putting down a deposit on my electricity was call my old electric utility and have them send the new company a letter of credit. Basically, they told the new company “This guy has been paying us on time for xx months with no delinquencies.” No deposit needed. I moved back to the first county 360 days later and didn’t need a deposit or a credit letter since I’d had an account there recently.

    Now, if I had been living with a roommate for a few years and all utilities were in his name, including the lease, I would have had to put up a deposit. I seem to recall having to do this for my first apartment after college, and I had a great credit score!

    Other than that, there isn’t a real, concrete reason to worry about what your credit score is doing. It just doesn’t affect your daily life.

    Reason #4: I act responsibly with my card
    Then you will also act responsibly with your debit card and cash.

    Okay, so those are some of the excuses reasons why people keep their credit cards. Now for some of the reasons you should be terrified of them:

    Reason #1: You spend more, generally
    Research shows that when you use credit cards, you will spend more than you would with cash. Who cares that you get 2% cash back when you spend 40% more?

    Reason #2: You’ll be tempted to use the card rather than the emergency fund
    Remember how I said in the Starter Emergency Fund post that the emergency fund needs to be inconvenient? The point of it being hard to use is so that you don’t “accidentally” use it for something that’s not an emergency. Well, if you’ve got this hard to use cash reserve, and this easy to use credit card, which one are you more likely to use?

    Reason #3: It’s a whole lot easier to get in trouble
    I don’t have credit cards, so it’s impossible for me to “accidentally” accrue credit card debt. It’s also impossible for me to rationalize spending more than I should in an emergency situation. Case in point: Recently a friend of mine had her car totaled. A drunk driver slammed into her parked car, and then ran off never to be seen again. She and her husband are a one car family, and had purchased the car a few months earlier from a family member for $1200. It was a great deal, and the car was fully insured. The check they got from insurance was for $5,000! Not a bad deal!

    This friend is of the “I’m a responsible person, so it’s okay for me to have a credit card” mindset. She asked for my help looking for cars, and at one point found a car she loved for $6,000. When I asked her if she had the extra $1,000 for the purchase price and the money to cover taxes, tag, and title fees, she told me that her plan was to just get a cash advance on her credit card. This is a person who spent a couple of years fighting to get out of credit card debt, yet this thought crossed her mind. I doubt she would’ve considered this course if she didn’t already have the card–she just would have avoided cars slightly outside of her price range. She didn’t end up getting that particular car, but I don’t know if she did end up using a cash advance at a 20% + prime rate to finance the car she did buy.

    Reason #4: The Credit Card companies hate you and will think of new and interesting ways to totally screw you.
    Do you know what a deadbeat is? You may think it means someone who doesn’t pay, but if you are in the credit card industry it means someone who doesn’t pay interest, ie the “but I pay mine off every month!” customers. After the CARD act was passed, banks started talking about these deadbeat customers and how they will no longer get a “free ride.” The first wave of this is the return of the annual fee. There are also countless consumer complaints and stories about credit card companies and banks either holding payment until after the due date (so you default, get a fee, and they charge you 30% interest that month) or rejecting payment altogether. They do this because most people will only fight about it for a very short amount of time before accepting defeat and paying up.

    So, there you have it. I suspect I’ll get a lot of haterade for this one, because people are pretty set in their dogma about credit. Let ‘er rip!

    [ETA: I originally wrote this post before Bank of America announced they would start charging $60 a year for debit cards. The easy solution there is to switch to another bank. I mean really, after all the shit they’ve pulled why were you still there anyway?]

  • Cue Creepy Music

    My father died in his sleep a little over two years ago. Two days before that he and my mother purchased a new home. After a couple of months my mother decided to move in to the new, smaller house and try to sell the old one. A couple of months after that, she rented it out.

    Mom started driving dad’s Trailblazer shortly after he passed. He was a smoker so she had the interior professionally cleaned. A few weeks later, she had a dream about him and the next morning she found a pack of cigarettes on the driver’s floorboard. Weird.

    I was talking with her last night, and she told me that her renters think dad “is still in the house. He mostly walks from the bedroom [where he died] to the back deck [where he smoked].”

    I’m not the kind of person that believes in ghosts, but once is happenstance…

  • Well that’s interesting

    I just deactivated my Facebook account.

    I had to enter my password twice and pass a CAPTCHA.

    You know, if I had to go through that hassle to activate all the new “features” (like the super-creepy timeline) they keep introducing, I probably would have kept my account.

    Oh, and they said pdb would miss me if I left.

  • Not sure if serious

    At New Shooter day, there were a couple of gentlemen at the range with matching BDU (or is it ACU? I can’t keep up) pants and UnderArmor wicking shirts. Under their station I spied some high-dollar MOLLE gear and noticed a unit patch I’d not seen before.

    Towards the end of our time there, a third gentleman showed up with the same stuff. I also noticed that their ear protection doubled as a communications headset.

    Three guys, matching equipment, shooting pistols at 50 yards. And consistently hitting clay pigeons at that distance.  Seeing as 5th Group SF is about 40 miles away from this range, I was…intrigued. When we left for the day, I noticed that the trucks they came in had the same logo as their unit patches as window decals.

    I also noticed the trucks were from the wrong county if they were associated with 5th group, and that the trucks didn’t have DOD stickers. Add the fact that this was a public range and I’d seen this kind of thing before* at this range, I investigated when I got home.

    And I discovered that those gentlemen were airsofters. I was also introduced to the term “MilSim.”

    Now, I am of two minds here. My initial response upon finding out these guys are weekend SpecOps LARPers was, quite honestly, ridicule.

    These guys came to a public range essentially “in character” and didn’t let anyone in on the joke. One of my new shooters asked them if they were professionals and they responded with “something like that.” When guy #3 started unloading his gear, he took a suppressor off of an AR, swapped out what looked to be a MultiMount Adapter, and put it on a pistol. I asked him about it, because the pistol was super quiet and I assumed it was the Gemtech MultiMount. He showed it to me, explained that it was legal, and told me who made it. It was only later that I found out it was airsoft.

    People don’t like being lied to, and I feel like these guys lied to us.

    My second, later reaction was Hey, airsoft or not, training is training and these guys were good. They were, after all, hitting clay pigeons at 50 yards with pistols. Real pistols.

    And apparently this MilSim thing is a BFD, and this M7 group is a BFD in MilSim. They like, travel the country and win money and stuff.

    So, are they really any different than other LARPers?

    What about Civil War Re-enactors? Are they odd because they dress up and play around with really old guns?

    How about WWII re-enactors? Paintballers?

    This MilSim thing seems like it would be fun, and would get trigger time on the cheap. The airsoft guns these guys use probably cost as much as the real thing, but whats the price per round? Plus you get team tactics and force on force training on the cheap? Sounds like something I need to investigate.

    I just wish these guys hadn’t acted the way they did at the range.

    *Actually, one of these guys may have actually been the guy from that story. Can’t say for sure, but there was a resemblance.