The Listening Project–Supplemental Blog 10

According to my records, I have bought exactly 1 CD in the past 200 days.  That seems incredible to me so I began to ask myself why, all of a sudden, I stopped having the need to purchase new (to me) music.  I came up with a few reasons.

• Job Change at Work: I changed jobs in June of 2013 and the work I do during this new role is not one that allows me to listen to music while I work.  I plowed through a lot of the almost 1200 CDs while at work (before I took this new job).
• I bought a Fiat: That Fiat came with a free year of Sirius XM and my CD collection cannot compete with the 80’s on 8 channel.
• The Motivation Project: For a brief period there, I swore off new music.

But, I did buy 1 CD in November…

#	Artist	Album	Date Listened	Again?
1189	Stryper	No More Hell To Pay	11/22/2013	Yes

• Stryper “No More Hell To Pay”: This is their best album of new stuff since their getting back together.  I put this in the Fiat’s CD player and listened to it to and from work for a whole week.  Michael still has his voice and they obviously can still play guitar.  I just packed up all 1200 CDs in a box in preparation for our big move in 2 weeks but this CD still is in the Fiat’s dash.  I only bought this CD as I had a $10 Best Buy coupon that expired in November.  The Best Buy closest to me closed and Best Buy sent me a $10 gift card to comfort me on this loss.  After tax and shipping, I think I paid just over $5 for the CD.

Jon

An Expensive Month To Move

In case you have not heard, we are building a new home.  Getting the exact date that we would have possession of this new home (and therefore when we could start moving) has been difficult.  We needed it 60 days in advance since our current lease indicates that is the amount of notice that we have to give.  Getting the builder to commit to a date that far in advance was not possible.  In the end we made a guess of Feb 4th and as it turns out we were not that far off as our closing date is scheduled for Feb 7th.  That happens to be a Friday so I confirmed with our landlords that we could push the date back a bit until Feb 10th so as to allow us a few days to move.  Our lease does not stipulate specifically what a partial month payment should be so I simply asked my landlords to provide a number.  Let’s say that I pay $1,000 in rent each month.  That is $12,000 per year.  Dividing by 365 would give us a per day cost of $32.88.  Our rent for 10 days would then be $328.80.  However, February happens to be the month we are moving in so this complicates matters.  What the landlord did (and I do not blame him) was to divide $1,000 by 28 for a per day cost of $35.71 and a 10 day rent total of $357.10 which is $28.30 more.  So, on top of all the other expenses with building / buying a new home and moving, I get this little extra bonus of a fee.

Speaking of painful things involved in this process, dealing with a lender.  My involvement with a lender started about 18 months ago when I asked my bank to look into whether or not I could refinance my Indiana property.  I filled out a form online and a few days later got a very large envelope with about 20 pages (if memory serves) of charts, tables and explanations.  Bottom line: I did not have enough credit history to get a credit score.  We signed up for a credit card from our bank and began charging stuff, not so much for refinancing but in anticipation of buying a home here in Texas after we had sold the home in Indiana.  Previous to that we had not had a credit card at all for a few years.

Fast forward to a few months ago when we had to pick a lender.  The incentives offered from the builder to use their preferred lender made this a no brainer on the surface but I did shop around a bit and the other lenders basically told me that I should use the lender preferred by the builder as they could not match any of their numbers.  Everything was OK until we locked our rate 45 days out and then the request for documentation began.  Most things that were asked for were understandable but 2 of them seemed over the top.

1. A copy of a check from last month that appeared as a deposit in my checking account statement that I provided to them.  I borrowed from my 401k account to help with the down payment and closing costs.  Despite telling my lender about this in advance (like 4 months ago) and despite providing a quarterly statement from my 401k provider that matched the deposit amount, they still wanted a copy of the check.  Now, I did not have the foresight to make a copy of this check and I did point out that IF they KNEW they would need a copy of this check then THEY could have told me when I told them about this check 4 months ago.  In the end, I chased this from both the issuer of the check and with my bank (a credit union actually) and thankfully the credit union came through quickly (with a bonus of only having to pay a $1 fee for this service).
2. Proof that I sold a house from 2006.  This one was a little strange.  I have bought a few houses in my life (4 to be exact) and I have never been asked to prove that I sold some previous house (other than say the one I was selling in order to move into the new house).  They (the lender) claimed that their fraud checking service caught this and as such the wanted me to prove that I had indeed sold this house.  In the end, not even my title company from 2006 could provide this document and the lender decided to take the risk of me lying about selling this house.

This paperwork is not limited to the lender, our home owner’s insurance company asked for a bunch of stuff as well (with the added complexity of switching our car insurance over the them).  Add that to getting down to crunch time with the builder and you can see how one might be overwhelmed.  At times like this I like to think like I do before a dentist visit: in just a little bit this will all be over and you will be in a better place (in this case literally) when this is all said and done.

Jon

A Love Letter To My Roku

I had the day off yesterday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  The kids (and subsequently the wife) did not.  They (the wife and kids) attend an all day Classical Conversationa meeting on Mondays as part of their home schooling.  When I first told the wife that I had the day off, she asked* (asterisk added as you husbands can do the translation) me if I wanted to come along for the day as some of the other dads did from time to time.  I quickly saw my day off diminishing in glory but then I got sick.

The wife and son were sick last week and it was my turn (the daughter has managed to avoid it thus far).  I have blogged in the past about how my wife acts when I am sick and I assure you that her reaction was the same as it always is (you will have to read the linked blog for more details).  At any rate, I had my Monday back again albeit with limited mobility as my body seemed to weaken with even the simplest of tasks (like blowing my nose).  This allowed me to spend the day with my new love, my Roku.  I did not think that something would come along so soon to replace my other recent love, my Raspberry Pi, but it did.

If you are not familiar with the Roku, it is basically a device that can turn your normal, Dumb TV into Smart TV.  Depending on the model of Roku that you buy, you can even connect your very old, very dumb cathode ray tube TV assuming it had RCA jacks.  Fortunately, my TV is not that dumb and with the help of the Roku I can use it to watch Netflix and a host of other online content via other providers (PBS, Smithsonian, Crackle, etc.) and using an app called Plex, I can get to my personal collection of ripped DVDs and CDs.  Plex even connects me to YouTube (should I run out of other things to watch).  Without this app, the Roku might not be as exciting to me so perhaps I should have titled this blog so as to include my love of Plex as well.  I even bought a 2nd Roku for the bedroom and the wife and I are almost through the 10th season of Frazier now (our nighttime ritual involves an episode or 2 before lights out).

So, as I was saying, I got to spend yesterday, all alone with only the couch, a cover, a few dogs and my Roku.  It all reminded me of a Peanuts cartoon that showed Charlie Brown lying in bed and smiling with the text “Happiness is being too sick to go to school but not too sick to watch TV.”  I plowed through a few Nicolas Cage, Denzel Washington and Mel Gibson movies and an episode of Wilfred.  On a side note, an old manager at work was on vacation in Germany last year where he was talking to a fellow tourist on a tour bus.  That tourist was an acting coach from Australia who used to coach the actor who plays Wilfred (a grown up man in a dog costume).  By my count, that is only 4 degrees of separation!  That story is also the only reason I began watching that show.

Anyway, if you have a not so smart TV and you have a Netflix streaming subscription then check out the Roku.  I got one of mine on sale at BestBuy and the other refurbished and on clearance at NewEgg.

Jon

Motivation Project–Abandonment

It comes as no surprise, not even to myself, that my Motivation Project did not work.  It has been so long, more than 4 months, since my last blog with this tag and honestly I don’t know where the wheels fell off exactly.  I know that I made a trip to Indiana for the wife’s 20 year high school reunion somewhere in there and something about being so close to so many local restaurants that served biscuits and gravy got me off the path.  If I had kept it up then I would be on day 152 and would have lost about 13% of my precious CD collection.

I have not abandoned the ultimate project behind this project though.  I still intend to get the weight off and my last blog kind of took off from that point.  I actually had started off again toward the end of December (albeit 15 lbs heavier) and then an ice storm hit rendering walking around the neighborhood quite impossible.  It was quite the event that ultimately cost me my only ice scraper that I still had left from my tenure in Indiana.  We were stuck inside the house for days and it was just enough to convince me to give up (again).

I have had so many false starts that I am tempted to give up.  Recently, the wife and I were re-watching one of the early episodes of the TV show “Til Death” (I will have to blog later of my new love for my Roku).  Some new neighbors had moved in and they were runners.  Seeing them prompted the wife to get back into shape (or at least appear to be a runner).  The husband, upon seeing his wife in jogging clothes, quipped, “What!? No, you said we could be fat. That was our 40th birthday present to each other.”  This is almost how I feel.  Like I want to give myself the present of not caring.  But, I owe it to my future self not to fall into that way of thinking (side note, I would be remiss if I did not make it clear that my wife is not yet 40).

Anyway, where do I go from here?  I thought about NOT writing this blog and then deleting my blog posts around this (now abandoned) project.  Obviously I did not do that.  It can serve as another reminder of how imperfect I am.  At any rate, the point of this blog was to close out this project and admit to the world that this motivation did not work for me.

Jon

A Letter To Myself

Dear Jon,

    At the time of this letter I am 44 years old and I am writing to you, my 65 year old self.  This is probably an easier concept for you to grasp on your side of things than it is for me on this side of 65.  I hope that all is well and that you indeed even exist (meaning that I both survived to be 65 years of age and that I still possess the mental capacity to read).  I hope that your 35 year wedding anniversary was a grand event.  I hope that you are enjoying retirement (please tell me you are retired!) and that you are enjoying your grandchildren.  I hope that this letter finds you still enjoying the house that is being built as I write this letter and I really hope that you are mortgage free.  Now, on to the main point of this letter.

    My son (or I guess more correctly, our son) is 15 years of age at the time of this letter and I have found myself speaking to him more and more about decisions he is now making and how they will affect him when he is 25 years of age.  I have asked him several times specifically, “How would your 25 year old self prefer you spend your time right now?”  Normally this question is asked within the scope of choosing to read a book or play one more game on the X-Box.  Unfortunately he is not thinking very highly of his future self (though he is getting pretty good at shooting people on the X-Box, a skill that I have mentioned repeatedly is NOT something that employers look for either now or likely 10 years down the road).  These conversations got me to thinking about you, my future self.  I do not know exactly why I am writing to you at 65 versus me / us at, say, age 55 but it probably has to do with my association with 65 and retirement.  At my current age, I cannot fathom retirement but 65 seems far enough into the future to have accomplished enough in order to be able to retire.  If you, my 55 year old self (or any other aged self), are reading this letter then keep in mind that this is not meant for you exactly.

    I was recently rereading some blog posts that we wrote the summer before we turned 40.  We seemed determined to get in shape / lose some weight before we hit 40 and if you recall we actually pulled it off.  I smiled as I read those posts and then also felt saddened and even ashamed at what I have let our body revert back to.  In the 5 years that have passed since then, I have returned to my pre 40 year old ways.  I could really use another spring / summer like that year where I had the time and motivation to get back to 180 lbs.  I seemed happy and excited, not just about getting in shape and losing weight but about everything.  It is not that I am not happy now, but I fear that I was happier then.  If I lose that much happiness every 5 years then I fear that you are not going to be a very happy person.  I am wondering what I can do about that.

    I want to start off by apologizing for any health issues that you currently have due to my neglect over the past 5 years.  I don’t exercise enough and I eat poorly.  I am hoping that this letter will spur me on and help me change my ways in a manner that will still be effecting you as you read this letter.  Our wife never stops offering to help us out but our stubbornness for some reason pushes us to do things on our own which more often than not results in nothing getting changed permanently.  On a side note, I can only imagine the daily regimen of pills that she now makes you take.  If I could chart the number of pills taken daily from Day 1 of our marriage up until now and then extrapolate to age 65, well all I can say is that the money you are not spending on that mortgage that I hope you don’t have is probably spent at the vitamin shop.  But I digress…

    As for what I am going to change to ensure your health.  I think it has to be both simple and extreme.  Simple plans have always worked the best and extreme plans have even worked better.  Cutting back on desert never works but cutting out desert altogether seems to have worked in the past.  We tend to like to play the part of the sufferer so forgoing desert, limiting coffee (or probably eliminating it) and daily exercise might fit the bill.  If nothing else, if I start a walking / jogging regimen now, by the time I reach your age you might be able to walk the dozen or so dogs that our wife will have certainly talked us into by then.

    Speaking of our wife, in case you don’t remember, we have an awesome one.  She even bought us a little Fiat 500 a few months ago.  I hope that you have fond memories of that car and the joy it brought us for the many years that it lasted with little or no mechanical issues.  As I mentioned before, we are currently in the final stage of building her a house and she is very excited.  I am not that excited as I am focused too much on the finances (you know how we are).  I am not sure why having a mortgage weighs so heavily on my mind.  I have had them before and I have never been in want and have always been able to pay the bills.  Also, no amount of raises or bonuses in any job that I have ever had has ever made me feel financially secure.  Thinking that more money will somehow change my feelings seems silly now that I think about it given that it has never changed my outlook previously.  I really should enjoy this time in our lives more and I make an effort to do so.  I will do my best to ensure that you have fond memories of your mid 40’s.

    I really hope this letter motivates me to change my habits in a positive way but I suppose you know if it did or not, huh?  I am not sure of a good way to end this letter so I will not attempt to think of one other than…

Best Wishes,

Jon (your former self)

PS: Do you really look like this?
http://www.in20years.com