ice water and ocicats

On the nonlinear evaluation of money:

If you've got a dollar and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you've got seventy-one cents left. but if you've got seventeen grand and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you.

~Steve Martin

Yep, personal finance has been on my mind lately, and not just because of the economic wibbly-wobbly on Wall Street. I've been trying lately to help a friend work through some stuff, and my own situation crosses my mind from time to time. I learned recently about a ratio where people compare the amount of their mortgage to their annual income; I'm not sure what this is called, but apparently 3:1 or 4:1 is a pretty normal ratio. Apparently we are underhoused, because ours is about 1:1 these days. Interesting. (I think we started at around 2:1, but since then we've paid down some of the balance and gotten pay increases). Would any homeowners on this thread care to share their ratio?

Kiva.org, my favorite source of microfinance endorphins, is also up to some new antics -- two new things. They have "lending teams" now, which allow you to count your loans toward a larger total. (I just joined "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious", who seem to be going up against "Kiva Christians" but are not winning yet. I'd like to note that I see this as a rather friendly competition though: effort from both sides is a great thing.)

The other new feature, more important, is that payments made on loans are now immediately available for reloan. I'm sure you're thinking "big deal": most payments made on loans of $25 or even $100 are only a few dollars, not enough to make a new loan. But when you have 20+ loans out at the time, as I did, with some of them almost paid back... well, it freed up $800 of Kiva credit. I was too busy to reloan right away, and so now I have $900 of credit and Kiva's out of entrepreneurs because of a surge of traffic. Zowie. Oh wait, some cattle folks from Azerbaijan just showed up, but I don't really like those... anyway, I'll be able to nudge the needle on the Atheists team all by myself if I ever get to see a good batch again.

Oh god, I don't feel like doing code-type thinking today. I feel verbal. And if anyone names the story that verbal gerbils are from, I'll give you cookies.

* For one thing, I just finished Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin (you've heard of her, yes? The high-functioning autistic woman who designs animal handling systems). As with anything on autism, a lot of things she said aroused echos in me. Most especially, it made me really, really wonder again whether the things I feel during social interactions are the things other people feel. ( Read more... )

* For another thing, I keep having to relearn some really simple physics regarding handstands! Note to self: to straddle up easily you must bring your head forward of your hands before trying to jump anywhere, doofus. Without that, it's hard. Based on yoga tonight, letting the head come through also helps a lot when trying to jump feet to hands with straight legs.

* We just interviewed a managerial candidate today who I would actually like to work for/with. It's a woman I once knew (just barely) from a figure skating club I used to go to, which might have been a little odd but actually wasn't. I hope we have the resources to get her. I don't want a sucky manager.

* Found out what the deal is with "im in ur something verbing ur somethingelse":

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/I_am_in_your_base_killing_your_d00ds

* Lastly, house stuff. I just got a letter from my gym letting me sign up for 1,2 or 3 more years, which made me wonder whether we'll have this condo for three more years. Answer: yeah, probably. We haven't even fixed up the kitchen yet! There is some work going on right now though -- the front and back stairwells are both being replastered, which means both sets of stairs are entirely covered with weird, really strong paper, and we can't get out our front door, and it smells funny and white powder is coming in under the doors. I'm glad now that our insurance made us get handrails, because that led to "well, while we're messing with the stairwells why don't we just..." and the walls have been in lousy shape ever since we moved in.

I slept until 1 PM today and then spent most of the day thinking about / getting ready for my mother's visit here next weekend. Actually, it's my mother and her husband on Friday, and then on Sunday we get heisenbug's father as well. I don't know what it is about mothers, but I'm currently rather worried that she'll get here and see how I live and suddenly think much worse of me. Which makes no sense, because I grew up in a household she was running that was way worse than this... but everyone has pet peeves, and who knows what little bit of motherly wisdom I've forgotten? Worse, what if it goes the other way and she finds our place intimidatingly nice? Grrrr, be quiet, brain.

With all these parental types descending, though, we've decided to hoppity-skip over a class boundary and have a cleaning woman in on Tuesday. Thus, I've tried to focus tonight on decluttering surfaces (yeah, that pile of papers on the couch) more than actually cleaning them. Last night we were at TBC's house for game night, and we got to watch him run his Scooba, and had an amusing debate over which is a lazier, more yuppified, plausibly embarrassing way of getting out of doing the mopping... hmm. Either way it's pretty clear that a career in software can get one out of mopping, if one is not a happy mopper. We're employing a local, independent person, so I'm pretty sure we're not being evil, just lazy.