This afternoon heralded in another round of EPIC weather in Wisconsin. Fog and mildly-cold temperatures gave away to sleet, and finally snow, as the minutes ticked by. Several of us slip-slided out of work a little early so that we could beat the rush hour traffic and worsening road conditions. My commute was slow, but I did not see any accidents.
Hope all of you are making it through the height of winter unscathed by the cold and snow. We’ve certainly had a lot of it.
Just to provide an update, Katie and Larry had their baby, a little boy named Henry, Tuesday evening. I heard the details, but did not jot them down, so I cannot provide baby specs (length, weight, exact minute of birth, etc.).
Phys is currently on-call for babysitting in case the newest member of the Dotzour family should arrive early. Althea’s website reports that Bryan’s parents are coming up to Madison to help out and meet their newest grandchild. They expect to arrive a little closer to the due date.
Cats don’t really know when it’s Saturday morning. They only know that you usually wake up sometime before the sun comes up and that’s when they follow you upstairs to have breakfast and play. If you don’t wake up at the time when they expect to go upstairs, cats have various methods of coaxing you awake early on a Saturday or Sunday so that you will walk them upstairs as per the normal routine.
Luckily, they will usually let you go back to bed and fall asleep again if that’s what you really want to do. We woke up to three cats snuggling with us late this morning.
We have a few errands to run today, but not much else planned.
PhysOrg is in Milwaukee part of the day tomorrow for Shakespeare. I will be gaming at our place in the afternoon and probably attending a film event with Phys in the evening.
The past couple of weeks I have been having some conversations with my co-worker about Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey, as well as the general sludge the whole nation seems to be sinking into at the moment, economically speaking. It was funny to see that she had started reading Women and Money today (which I finished last week) and we were talking about Orman’s Saturday night show on CNBC.
Haha, it’s nice to have a few interests in common with someone at work. It makes the day more agreeable. My co-worker is about eight years older than me, lives out of town, and has a teenage kid, so our lives in other ways are a bit different.
It has been snowing most of the day today and the roads were pretty bad on the drive home. I took the long way through town, made coffee when I got home, and started working on the driveway. Left a bit at the end for PhysOrg to do. I am going to heat up some soup for us while he finishes up the shoveling and then we have a guild meeting 
EDIT: Just as a note, I had e-mailed our friend Larry a few days ago to see how he and his wife are doing and he wrote back last night. Tomorrow is their due date and so they are expecting a baby pretty much any time now … he says they “have been seeing small signs” How exciting! PhysOrg’s sister, Althea, and brother-in-law, Bryan, are also expecting a new addition to the family within the next few weeks. So there are a couple of reasons to be excited for people in our lives!
EDIT2: Not to imply that those are the only babies in the works. A little farther out in the year, there are more! (No, none of them are mine, and that’s perfectly OK for the time being)
The past couple of days have been the coldest we’ve had this winter and the sub-zero and low-positive temperatures are supposed to continue through the work week.
We sent Joe and Becky off to the airport yesterday around 7:30 and crawled back into bed. Not even freshly-brewing coffee could keep us awake. We drank it later when it was stale and filmy.
It was nice having Joe stay with us during his college break (and seeing Becky pretty frequently as a result)
We have a guest bedroom and enough extra space/beds to sleep three or four extra people at any given time, which is one plus of having a roomy house. The main level (living/dining room and kitchen) has quite a bit of space, but when we have eight people present for gaming, it’s pretty crowded around the table– we have a lot of furniture in the living/dining room and some of it is fairly massive.
Our big game has been cancelled for today, though. One person is on a cruise. Two people are visiting friends out of state and two people have errands to do with family.
Quiet Sunday.
***warning- this post contains live underwear***
It seems like everything goes on sale after the holidays. You can pick up holiday decorations for a fraction of the original price, but there are a lot of good sales on winter clothing and other items that people need to replace or decide that they want while they are returning gifts that didn’t fit or rummaging around because they have time off.
This year I felt impulsive enough to check out the Victoria’s Secret post-holiday sale and I have to report that IT IS NOT A SALE. Nonetheless, the shop was swarming (SWARMING!) with high school and college chicks and mothers with pre-teen and young teen daughters. The occasional Man-With-His-Woman was also staking out the place. They may or may not have had a stroller or baby carrier.
The current primary target audience for Victoria’s Secret (ages 12-22? maybe younger?) might explain why the company sells underwear emblazoned with Yorkshire Terriers and candy. Apparently the company catchphrase is “Pink” and this word appears on many of their products, even if the panties in question are NOT pink.
But the “sale” … a sale is never really a sale when you require people to buy multiple items in order to receive a discount. Not only that, but they have to be from the same product sub-genre to qualify (a thong from Pile A and a thong from Pile B cannot be combined to produce the 2-thong discount). AND not only that, but a sale is never really a sale when the merchandise is way overpriced before the discount.
So, to sum up … I can’t really see the benefits of shopping at Victoria’s Secret. I’m not sure whether it’s just the deception involved in calling a not-sale a “sale” or the merchandise itself or some other bias that has crept into my heart … I also think their marketing (and products) could and should be hitting an older audience. The sale stuff irritates me, but given the younger end of the target audience, it’s also downright creepy.
Besides, working women have more expendable income than pre-teen girls, but we’re not going to buy boy-short undies with blue puppies and the word “Pink” printed on them.
Congrats to Sis, who will be working from home full-time, starting … nowish?
Talk about shortening your commute!
I reviewed and re-adjusted my work retirement account investments last night. By accident (or circumstance), it has done pretty well, but I realized I wasn’t really digging my heels in and investing aggressively in high-growth potential stock. I might as well have more risk in my life. That account is going to be around for a long time …
I know my parents always made a pretty good return on their stock investments and I don’t think they were too diversified in their early years (I hope this has changed)– so they probably could have made more money, but they certainly saw more yield than sticking their “leftover money” in a regular savings account. Or under their mattress.
The tax assessment for last year showed that the value of our house increased (and so did our property taxes). I made a phone call to ask some questions about that this week and was pleasantly surprised to find that our escrow account is pretty easy to understand. I knew how it worked, I just didn’t know we had a cushion. Now I just need to learn how taxes are assessed.
I will probably be opening a couple more savings/retirement accounts over the next year or two. I should make more money. Conveniently, it’s time to leave for work!
I read this post (from a blog I read) first thing this morning. It may be the most interesting few paragraphs I will read all day. Lots to think about there. For starters, do we spend money (as an offshoot of “follow[ing] the lives of celebrities”) to produce a false sense of community?
Now I wish I had taken an economics class in college, too …
My life right now, as explained in an email this morning:
– work full time
– spend a minimum of 70 minutes PER DAY commuting (makes me grimace to think about spending all of that time in traffic)
– game twice a week with friends
– plans in the works for a weekly movie night with friends
– cook most nights and clean up afterwards (which I enjoy)
– other chores (laundry, cleaning, organizing, snow management, bills- not daily)
– online activities 2-3 nights per week, weekends
– reading (don’t spend enough time doing this, but I have been motivated lately)
– keeping an eye (sometimes diligently, sometimes not) on the job market
– occasionally having a date with my fiance (we have lunch on Fridays and occasionally a “night out” date)
– wedding planning– this will require more thought and work as time goes on, but I think the pieces will fall into place fairly easily (very little has been done on this front yet, but a few details have solidified)
Powered by WordPress