Fish or Cut Bait

The karate crack dealers have let me know that my cheapo month is up and to keep going costs a mere 10X as much. They run "specials" that run only for limited times so I have something like 3 days to cough up some dough.

Here's the thing. It's not that I'm a gung ho pro karate, OMG this will save me someday kind of gal. But I am someone who prefers to work out with other people and do guided exercises that I don't have to think up. So much the better if they get changed up every so often. I'm not getting that at the gym I haven't been going to. They do have some classes, but they only have one or two that I like and they aren't at times that I find either convenient or easy to get to. With the karate, they call to make sure I'm going to my weekly private lesson. There are 3 weeknight classes and for the most part I've made all 3 for a month. The time works for me. The location works for me. They mix up the lessons so different lessons focus on different aspects of blocking, punching, kicking, sparring, or grappling. (It is all some kind of fighting though, which I somehow still find weird.)

The studio is near a gold's gym, but dude, Duane "The Rock" has been known to work out there, as does my boss's boss. I'm not sure I want my potbelly on display there until I get it a bit more under control. I've not done a good job running my fitness by myself. I tried to work out with cabinet boy, but he started working out at 5am before work after I got him rev'd up about exercising. I don't really have a work out partner or a hiking partner or anything. It would help to have one. It could be that I need to pay a sensei to call me for now.

One reason for moving cross country was to add some variety to my life. I wasn't really seeking karate as such, but it might be a pretty good choice for right now. If I'm willing to spend about $200 a month, and kinda commit for 6 months. Which due to the stock price being up and me having some options to sell, I can pay for although I was rather planning to spend the money on some professional organizers to help dig me out of my place and set up some systems so I don't keep getting overrun with stuff. I'm not sure I can do both, but sitting on the couch watching cable isn't getting me fit or organized. If it were only $50 and I could sign up for, say, 3 or 4 months, I would just say yes.

poll by twiigs.com

Flake Boy

So... Flake Boy flaked on Valentine's day. Previously he's flaked on stuff, but nothing with actual importance. Based on him doing this before, generally for "we'll do lunch" type plans, I've told him that if he wants to bail, he must call, or text if he's to wussy to call. Yet nothing this time. Ironically, it's not that Valentine's Day is actually important to me. What is important is he made it a point to invite me out 2 weeks in advance, and discussed possible plans in the interim, then ignored a phone call, text, and email on the day of, only calling me with a lame excuse when his mom came home and yelled at him. Not cool. (I'm guessing because he knew he was being a jackass and didn't want to hear it.) And it's the one day a year I can't just meander over to the local joint and drink up without looking like I got ditched.

Because I know he's a bit of a flake, despite showing up when I needed his help on the kitchen, I didn't ask him to pick me up from the hospital this coming thursday, but instead am getting my mom to fly out and drive me home. Ok, and coddle me afterward and make sure I don't die in my sleep or otherwise need to go back to the doc. But still. If he was more reliable, I could have asked him.

So we're in negotiations as to whether or not he's willing to not be a jackass. Could go either way right now. I talked about it with my brother who is on the "dude, that's seriously not cool" side, like me.

I got to thinking about it though and I'm someone who fundamentally runs late. I do try to mitigate this and be on time when it's non-negotiable (like being in a wedding, catching a plane or live theater show, or a job interview). I don't do this to piss people off, and I'm intending no discourtesy, it's just the way I roll, although I do work to minimize lateness when it's possible. (Up to and including getting surgery to help my sleep disorder.) But basically, I don't hang out with or work for people who get seriously jacked by my running late.

One thing though, is if I say I'll show up, I'll show up. (And almost always soon enough to be useful.) It's only in the last couple of years I've given myself permission to change my mind after accepting an invite. But I always, always contact whomever it is that I'm bailing on, and I do it in advance when possible. Because I think it's fundamentally rude to say you're going to show and then not show. However, I don't think it's fundamentally rude to be a little late. Yet I am aware that some people do think there's nothing worse that being late - like I said, I don't hang with them. So my question for the boy is whether or not he's just going to bail without notice on occasion and think nothing of it, in which case I'm not really interested in being stood up and I shake him off. Or if he recognizes it as bad behavior that affects me and is willing to work on it. I'm currently open to that because he is a good egg when he bothers to show up.

What do you all think?

poll by twiigs.com

Careful What You Wish For

Whenever I get too disappointed about something minor, I remember The Nacho Cheese Incident and think about karma.

The NCI occurred several years ago. I was on my way home and stopped at Taco Bell for a Nachos Supreme with no sour cream. And they gave me a Nachos Supreme with sour cream. This makes the dish inedible for me, so I asked them to fix it. I checked that the next one didn't have white and headed for home. When I pulled out the nachos, not only did it not have sour cream, they'd also left off the nacho cheese. By this point I was tired and hungry and cranky and didn't want to fight 8 minutes of traffic to go the 2 miles and fix a $1.59 food item, so I ate it, wallowing in misery, and complained bitterly. I wanted my nacho cheese, dammit!

The following day was my regular day to help out a local charity by driving leftover school cafeteria food to a homeless shelter. I'd been doing this for several months and felt pretty good about it. The cafeteria had added a taco bar that often had leftovers. Along with the student volunteer, I loaded up tubs of soup, taco fixings, leftover mashed potatoes and whatnot in the hatch of the '85 Nissan Stanza to make the trip of just a few blocks. When we arrived to unload the food, we found that the nacho cheese had tipped over, spilling roughly a gallon of it into the carpet of my car. Apparently my plea for nacho cheese went into the ether, and rebounded with a vengeance.

We had winter holiday shutdown at work. It was just shy of two weeks. I'd taken a couple days off the previous week to go to San Fran, came back and worked 2 days, then got 12 days off. On the rare occasions that I get 2 weeks off from work (Sept 2006 with a trip to Italy was the last), I come back feeling like I've had a month off. With the parents visiting and one thing and another, this was a nice vacation, but despite one long weekend and nearly two weeks, it felt like I'd only been out for a long weekend.

We found out today. I'll get another shot at feeling like I get a month off. I'll be off from March 14 - 28. Apparently the market is still playing it safe and orders are there, but they're all conservative. I'm not annoyed about having 2 weeks off. I can handle it. But I had been hoping to take a vacation in June - going to Alaska for the solstice or thereabouts. March in Alaska doesn't really hold the same appeal, I have to say. So while I'm still going to try and figure out how I can swing Alaska, it probably means unpaid vacation in March. And I need to figure out somewhere else to go. Boston in March is not so wicked awesome, weather wise. It's possible I could get to Hawaii, but I think this might coincide with spring break, driving prices up. Also available are driving tour of southwest and Grand Canyon, SCUBA trip to carribean, and Minnesota for mom's birthday. I'm not convinced that I want to drive all that by myself, the spring break thing could be an issue, and Minnesota is only marginally better than Alaska in March.

Also, very soon, I have to figure out when to get my nose and tosil surgery. I'm kind of feeling like I don't want to blow my shutdown time on recovery and I'm impatient to see if it helps. So I'm hoping to do that early february. Which would be about a week from now, eit!

It also occurs to me that if my vacation coincides with spring break, I could do some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity somewhere that is not here. (I have no objection to helping my neighbors, I just need to vacation away from my condo. San Diego would work, as long as I find somewhere not-here to sleep.) After listening to the call for service from my new president, perhaps this volunteer vacation is the way to go.

So if you can help me figure out what to do with my time off (or want to travel somewhere with me), sing out. I'm looking for ideas. The crazier the better. Or vote for one or more of the above.

My Eyes, My Eyes!

This title feels like a reference from somewhere, but it could be more ubiquitous or obscure than I could easily nail down with google. While I didn't get a hit that resonated with me a to source, google did send me to this fantastic link of Simpsons done as Anime which I consider a good omen.

I've got 10 more days to make the final decision on getting laser eye surgery this coming January or to put it off for a year. (Or, forever.) If your attention span is short, skip the following and take the poll at the end of the post. If your attention span can last, here's all the stuff rattling around in my head on the topic.

I checked it out. I was worried about the "reading glasses" thing that hits later. But it turns out to be the difference between reading glasses and bi- or trifocals, not glasses and no glasses. Simplistically, vision is controlled by the shape of the corneal lens and the eye muscles that change the shape of the eyeball to adjust the fine focus on the retina of the light coming through that lens. (Then the brain takes the signals from the retina and does all kinds of image processing.) The thing that laser surgery corrects is the lens shape. Glasses or contacts adjust the incoming light so that the wonky lens shape gets tailored light it can then resolve.

I've got a friend who has "cheaters" that work well for her. These are hard contacts you wear overnight that reshape your cornea. The work they do is not permanent which is a good and bad thing about them. I think this is a really interesting idea. But my goal is to have fewer daily maintenance tasks, and I'd like to wake up and be able to see - I think it makes a difference in my ability to be alert in the morning. So wearing contacts overnight is more work than I want to introduce to my bedtime and morning routine.

There's a laser surgery place in Beverly Hills that does work on celebrities and non-celebrites. I figure someone who makes their living correcting the vision of people who stand to lose multi-million dollar contracts if their eyesight goes wonky has to be pretty careful and a great track record. I've got an appointment there in January. They are expensive, but not out of line. It's a flat fee that covers everything including potential adjustments in the future. The places that say $300 per eye don't necessarily include follow up care and some say that worse vision will cost more. I don't want to go bargain basement with my eyes. I'd rather overpay then risk my vision.

The trick is that while I think $5000 is "reasonable" for the service, I still need to come up with $5K. I use the medical spending reimbursement account which has a $5K limit. This means I get the $5K tax free if I use it to fund the surgery, so it actually costs closer to $3300 of money I would see. My out of pocket medical expenses this year are nearing $2000 which I find astonishing because on the whole I'm really healthy. But I have allergies and chasing "non-restorative sleep" causes and symptom treatment is like throwing money down a black hole.

In the election brouhaha, I did some research and it turns out my salary is in the top 20% of salaries nationwide. But I live in one of the top 10 most expensive places in the country. My top 20% salary after 12 professional working years, 10 years of student loans, saving what I can, and the dot com bust back in the day meant I could buy one of the 10 cheapest condos in my county which was originally built as low income housing. Which is to say my disposable income isn't even close to being in the top 20%. I don't have kids and other such obligations, I can eat out at lunch (although that budget has been cut too), and I can afford gas and some treats. But living high on the hog I am not.

My job, for the most part, seems stable (go wireless!) although I have no illusions of big raises in this economy. I kept some money set aside to renovate the condo a bit and I'm chewing through that at pretty good clip. I'm running into deficit spending this year, so I'm actually using some of the savings for regular stuff as well. I got a pretty large income tax return last year, but I don't know if that was due to special circumstances (part of my relocation was costed out last year, and part the year before) since I'm new mortgage payments and their effect on taxes. If all goes well, the income tax return would cover most of the eye surgery.

If all doesn't go well, the income tax return might not exist or might cover only a fraction of the cost. And my cash reserves are not extensive. Currently they about cover my non-mortgage debt which I have not paid off so as to maintain a cash reserve on what used to be the outside chance that credit would not be easily available as I'm used to. These last thousand paragraphs can be summed up as if I get this surgery, I will be at risk of running out of money to the point where I will seriously have to cut back on food. Maybe.

On the "get the surgery now" side of the contract is I can get the reimbursement almost immediately so I won't be without the money right away, it's just that my paycheck will go down by a couple hundred dollars. Everyone I've talked to said it was the best thing they ever spent their money on and they'd do it again in a heartbeat and sooner than they did. Right now, I'm a very good candidate for the surgery and I should have a decade or more of glasses free living (although I do like my Kate Spades). I really think it will affect my ability to focus in the morning. If I go bust, they can't take my eyes back.

On the "delay a year" side is that I already have new glasses and a year's worth of contacts so I shouldn't incur more expenses on that front for a year. I don't know how my medical expenses will shake out. If I have to shell out another $2K next year in addition to the $5K for my eyes, I don't know where that money will come from. I don't know how the economy will treat my paltry remaining few non-retirement investment dollars outside the cash/money market condo/emergency fund which are down almost 50% from last year and what I had thought to use on the surgery but didn't move to a money market and now it's hardly worth cashing them out. I don't have any family backup money. I won't starve, but I won't be able to do anything fun either, if the tax refund is off or anything else unexpected comes up.

I've assessed it before. While I like to think I take risks, I don't really. I have a low risk tolerance for my basic needs. Once I have enough money to meet my basic needs, I have lots of risk tolerance because I don't care about money for its own sake or power or anything. This also means I tend not to put myself out to build up reserves once I'm comfortable. Which makes me a bad candidate for commission sales - that's my brother's thing.

I have to decide in the next 10 days or so whether to set aside $2K for medical expenses next year or $5K. And I'm completely torn. One part of me thinks, "just do it and worry about paying for it later, like college, it's a quality of life investment." The other side of me thinks that $5K is a lot of money in these trying times that could be better utilized as a mattress pad until signs become clearer. Or I get a better raise.

What's the opinion from out in blogland?

poll by twiigs.com