Tarkblog

Here’s a sample of tidbits from the week past.

Monday was a scary day. I ended up in the emergency room around 9am after a pretty severe heart palpatation combined with a fluctuating pulse, high blood pressure, and overall sense of nausea and doom came over me. They found nothing wrong, told me my heart was in great shape, and sent me on my way. I have a visit with my primary physician this week, but all last week I felt pretty miserable. In hindsight, I think it wasn’t heart related but instead was something gastro-intestinal, and the morning coffee I had drank caused my heart jitters. Hopefully I’ll know more soon.

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My 30-day-after-buying-a-new-car trip to the BMV was looming, so I bit the bullet and went on Thursday around 10AM. The two main reasons I hate going are because A) you never know if you have all of the correct paperwork or not and B) it’s friggin slow.

Our BMV moved sometime last year, and I hadn’t been to the new facility yet. This led to me to some new observations. First, in order to make things go faster, there is a computer kiosk you can use to speed up straightforward renewals. This is fantastic in concept. However, they put this computer system in the entry way of the BMV which is a small room about 6 feet by 6 feet, and you have to walk through it to get in and out of the place. With 10 people waiting in line to use this machine, that room was downright packed. And trying to walk through that packed room to get in and out was a nightmare. BMV–.

When I got to the checkin desk, she asked me what I was going to do and I told her. She scanned my license and told me to have a seat. No number ticket system anymore. They call your name when it’s your turn. This sucks because you have absolutely no idea now who is in front of you or how long it will be. Even though there were a good 20-30 people sitting around waiting, I was only about the 3rd person in line and it took less than 10 minutes to get called.

My transaction started surprisingly fast, because they had all of the information about my new car in the computer system already. I didn’t have to provide any paperwork whatsoever (and I’m not sure then why I even had to go to the BMV in the first place then). However, I had to remove the registration on the stolen yellow car my new one replaced. This was tricky, because that car had some kind of misinformation in the system requiring lots of managerial approval and overrides and other stuff in order to make that work.

While there I decided to go ahead and have my driver’s license address updated to reflect our change of address. That process took a while too. For some reason, the form I had to sign that was printed out of the computer wanted me to verify that I had received property motorcycle training. This was for a normal driver’s license, though. I’ve never owned a motorcycle. We had to get that glitch taken care of.

All in all, my experience went well. However, when I was leaving I noticed a good 10-15 people waiting just to check in. I’m glad I got there when I did.

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I took a brief trip to the riverboat casino on Saturday to play a little poker. I lost my bankroll ($200) in about an hour and a half. It was an all-in Kings vs. aces, and I had the kings. I think I’m done with the live action stuff; the small $5 internet games are much more fun for me.

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The taxes are done and filed, and we’re getting back a sizeable return. I hate getting tax $ back; I would have rather had it back during the year. However, owning two homes last year gave us a substantial mortgage deduction (mind you, I would have rather NOT had that second house and made that SECOND payment all last year). And the fact that we donate a lot to goodwill and keep the receipts helps too.

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In light of this tax $, we splurged and bought a new TV for the bedroom. It’s a 27″ flatpanel LCD widescreen HDTV. We don’t have any HD channels, so that’s kind of wasted right now, but maybe someday soon we’ll have them. It’s an “Olevia” brand, which translated into about $200 cheaper than anything else in the same size, and it seems to be okay. The biggest downside is that Tivo remove doesn’t work with that TV, so I have to maintain two remotes. Unsubscribe, but I’d rather have saved the $200 than combine into a single remote.

We also put a chunk of tax $ into our Roth IRA. The rest I suppose will go into savings awaiting the start of our next remodeling project.

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A week ago last Friday I took the day off and went to work with my wife. The main jist was I was providing some Linux training to her department (she’s in IT at a university). It was interesting to see how their facility worked. And we got lunch at the student center for the faculty price of $3.50. Holy cow; if I worked there I’d eat at this place everyday. It wasn’t stellar, but the price was right!

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Somehow the computer in the new Maxima has gone mildly defunked. As a result, the left turn signal now blinks at warp speed (the right signal seems to be okay). I obtained some wiring diagrams last night and based on what I can tell there are no electronics involed in the timing of the signal - it’s all internal to the processor. I’m waiting for a few more issues to crop up before I take it to the shop, but it’s annoying at best.

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We have a Disneyworld trip scheduled for October. Consider me stoked. We’ll be staying at the Beach Club - none of us has stayed there before, though we’ve walked by it many times. The location and pool are so amazingly awesome. We’re staying at a concierge level suite, meaning it costs $TEXAS^2 (seriously, it’s embarassing how much this room costs). But it will be split multiple ways amongst our party. The fun begins for me getting the next 8 months to plan all of the activities, including a Cirque shows, meal reservations, the halloween party, and a luau. There might be some boating festivities on the water to watch the fireworks as well. I’m so absolutely stoked for this trip, and Annie is genuinely excited.

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My mom e-mailed me last week to inform me she was losing her job. In all actuality, she’s not, because she works for the state’s welfare/workforce improvement department and it’s being privatized, meaning she will become an employee of IBM or some such data processing service instead. However, with 28 years in she’s only a couple of years away from a full pension with the state, and she’ll now not get that opportunity unless she can find another state job to move to. And of course she’s pretty confident that after a few months at the new job she’ll be eliminated as they transition to offshore personnel. Time will tell. In the meantime, she has nothing good to say about Mitch.

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The wife is taking this Friday off and we’re going to Chuck E Cheese for lunch with some friends’ kids. The last time I went with them, I showed them how to find the games with big unwon jackpots that you could seriously cash in. It’s been requested that I go again, so as to help with the stockpiling of the tickets. And c’mon, who doesn’t like skeeball?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.