My boyfriend’s dog peed on my laptop. Not intentionally. We think she was sitting on his couch (which she’s not supposed to do) and had an accident. Poor girl’s fur was soaked in pee which leads us to think she might have a bladder problem.

Some of the moisture got wicked up the little cracks in the bottom of the laptop and now it’s fried. I’m going to take it into the Apple store and see what can be done. I have the original receipt.

I use it pretty much as a terminal for blogging and checking email at his house since I like to be able to check email daily so it’s not vital, but it does explain a little about why posting has been light recently. I dislike using his computer for my stuff. The really important stuff is on my desktop at home, which gets a regular back up on an external hard drive.

I’m just sad because there is no way I can replace it for the same price I paid. This was a laptop my friend did not want because she hated it. I got an extremely good deal on a gently used model that is fully loaded with software. The timing is also terrible since I was going to take it to Boston this weekend to entertain me when I fly.

At any rate, if we thought the dog was going to pee there, we wouldn’t have left it on the couch. As it was, this is the first time she’s done this sort of thing and now we’re worried she has a bladder issue.

You can’t get mad at a dog. You just can’t. She was so happy to see us when we got home that night. I don’t understand people who think dogs are sneaky and malicious. Cats are sneaky and will poop in your closet. Dogs are dumb and sweet. I really like my boyfriend’s dog so my fellow co-worker’s suggestion that I make ultimatums about me or the dog were way out there.

Boyfriend has offered to pay for a new battery, but I don’t want to say ok till the damage is fully assessed. Maybe there is a magic rescue for it.

Stop for a moment. Think about your life without ice cubes. Without cold beer. Without convenient frozen dinners. I perish at the thought!

A few weeks ago while I was home with my mom and dad, we were talking about breakfast. My mom has this prune and honey spread she and my dad like to eat on toast. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It’s basically some fresh onion pureed with some dried prunes. Then you mix in some honey and let it ferment for about a month. When you taste it, it’s sweet and slightly savory without the harsh bite of raw onion. Fascinating, but I also instantly got an allergic reaction to the fruit in it. My mom likes it because she can make it in small batches and put in an old jam jar and it keeps without refrigeration.

My folks grew up without refrigeration in pre-war Korea. Visiting the old farmstead where my father lived, it’s not hard to see that there wasn’t electricity running to the house. Visiting Korean Folk Village (kind of the Colonial Williamsburg of Korea with re-enactors, etc.), my mom clapped her hands with joy over an old provincial farmhouse which she said was just like where she grew up. I was agog at the huge ceramic amphorae buried underground for long-term kimchee storage. (Amphora is probably a bad term for them since they technically aren’t Greek and don’t store wine, but I digress.)

Years ago while on a work project, my sibling was working on a home in West Virgina for an old lady who had no refrigeration in the house. The resident still kept her perishable items in the cold mountain stream out back of the house. This was in the late 1980’s. I don’t know if that lady ever got refrigeration, but it surprises me that she lived that way. I cannot tell if it was poverty or a choice. Given the work project criteria for selecting homes to fix, probably the latter compounded by the former.

Conceptually, I think it’s hard for people to grasp what it’s like to live without refrigeration. I know there is a simple pleasure to popping open a can of chilled mandarin oranges on a hot summer day. (One of the few fruits I can eat.) I have been contemplating my mom’s onion, prune and honey spread for a few days and I can only think that the natural anti-microbial properties of onion and honey must do some sort of natural preservation.

Sometimes I like to think about how people lived without the modern conveniences of the 20th and 21st centuries. I try to appreciate what it is that I have and remember what is non-essential about life and living. Counting our blessings in a way, I suppose. Next time I look at a super charged Audi A3 fully loaded at nearly $35K, I will have to remember that I really don’t need a car like that. My Altima still gets me from Point A to Point B reliably.

Apparently, this is the case. My mother, in her loving Korean way, tried to tell me that I should turn my modest studio into a palace. I had to remind her through gritted teeth, that I am doing the saving she always exhorts, paying for the family cellphone contract, and going to help her with her roof. Exactly where do I have money left to beautify my home after the bills get paid? Sumptuous draperies are not my aspiration. Never has been.

I suppose I could find the money to spend on my condo, but I don’t think my mother understands that I like my studio’s small footprint. I like that it’s got the furniture it needs. While the kitchen and bathroom need updating, I put *her* roof ahead of my home and any money I’ve got will be heading towards my debt and the roof she wants next year.

I got a nice birthday card and $100 cash over the long weekend. I’m not ungrateful. It’s very sweet of my parents to continue to give me a birthday present. I just want a little perspective though. I’m not a miser. I just live more simply than my parents think I should. I also didn’t tell them that I’m hardly in my apartment. And when I am, I’m sitting at my desk staring at the computer. Mostly I need a nice desk chair and maybe a new mattress.

The point of living in a studio is not to live lavishly. It’s to live. Period. I don’t need, nor want it to be a castle. *sigh* When are my parents going to get it? They won’t. It’s ok. But then they wonder why I don’t want to come home to hear their litany of shoulds and shouldn’ts.

I am dreaming of my paycheck. I have a huge surplus of cash right now, which I am saving for the bachelorette party this weekend. I also need to have a surplus going into the next pay cycle when I send off a huge payment to one of my credit card companies. Without reserving a little from the current paycheck, I will be short on the next paycheck. I hate not having a little something in my checking account.

Also, I cannot, for the life of me, find my Lasik receipt. Since I couldn’t see a damned thing for a few days, I put it on my table with a lot of other crap. I thought I had filed it away with some other things, but I cleaned that up over the weekend to prepare my taxes and get organized, but it did not turn up. I’m going to have to call for a copy of the receipt. At least I found the reimbursement forms at work now. (HR with my new company can be a pain in the neck.)

Once that’s done and I get reimbursed, I will be able to cut my credit card balance down by about 25-30%. Woe unto me for my bureaucratic apathy! I’m paying finance charges and interest! That my children, is the cost of laziness.

Where I live, I can join the local county credit union. I don’t need to do anything but prove that I’m a resident.

Every once in a while, I think about joining a credit union. I started a new job with a large company and I checked out my credit union options. Honestly, there weren’t very many through my company. The strange irony being, that there are about 30 credit unions across the nation that were founded by company employees back in the day. But none of the existing ones are convenient to me.

While perusing the Arlington VA Credit Union website, I see they have 12 month CD’s still paying out 4% APY, with an option to bump up. I’m thinking about it since ING Direct is only paying 3.4%. I still keep about $1200 in CD’s at ING at 5.0% APY or slightly better, but those are about to expire in the next few months without a great rate available. These CD’s form the core of my emergency fund, which I’ve let dwindle and haven’t built back up.

I know I should be constantly building back my savings. But right now the plan is to save by spending. I’m tossing lots of money at my credit cards since the interest rate is much higher than any savings rate I can find. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t shop around for these small CD’s I have since I have no intention of cashing them out to leave myself with nothing to fall back upon.

Crud. I could have used this site while I was shopping at Babies R Us the other day.

RetailMeNot is the sister site of BugMeNot. While I was writing another post, I visited BugMeNot and saw the link for coupons.

I’m not a coupon clipper, but being able to look up a coupon when I’m ready to buy is exactly what I need.

And now it’s my gift to you. (no coupon necessary)

I didn’t find it through HC at One Big Mortar Board, but she did blog about this a few days ago. I am only finding it now because I’m behind on reading other blogs.

I’m a big consumer of the Washington Post and WAMU (NPR-affiliate at American University).

Here’s a few stories I thought were great and wanted to pass along. Keep in mind, the Washington Post articles may require login. I recommend BugMeNot.com if you need one. But the Post doesn’t spam you if you sign up. (Not that I’ve noticed. They only bombard you if you get email news alerts. That I do regret.)

From Michelle Singletary’s column, Military Money Makeovers. This year she features three couples in the military or affiliated, and I’m actually kind of surprised. Some of them make really good money, yet seem to indulge themselves or else not crunch the numbers to make sense (going upside down on cars or losing money on a rental property). What makes me sad is that these are folks making really good money, but there’s a lot of younger military couples out there trying to scrape by on even less.

Kiplinger’s via WaPo: Tax Planning for your first job. Good advice for new hires!

Couples and their differing money styles. I think this is a great article. It’s a good reminder that money discussions are really important. That’s not to say it’s the first subject you talk about, but I’m trying something different with my new boyfriend and that’s to be frank about how we pay the check and other financial issues. I refuse to sit idly by with someone only to learn later on what a mess their financial life is. I make a point of ferretting it out a guy’s finances, not to be a gold digger, but to plan appropriately for the future.

Kojo Nnamdi interviews Bob Sullivan of Gotcha Capitalism. (First link is to the radio program. Second link is to Amazon.com for his new book.) I was really struck while listening to this program. Credit card companies and banks are going to nickel and dime us to death with their fees. I’m starting to think I’m better off with my local credit union, but I still feel like I’m being well served by my large retail bank without much hassle. (Especially since their ATMs are everywhere and there’s a branch near my regular bus stop.)

Kojo again with some basics on Investing.

That sounds like a harbinger post of something really fabulous that’s going to happen to me in 2008. But quite literally, I got some new turn signals for my car this year.

Either they’d stay on without blinking, or blink a few times and turn off, or not turn on at all. I tried to get through this for a few days till the weekend when a friend could fix it for me, when finally, it got to be too unsafe and too scary. I took it to the local dealer whom I dislike because of their class-action discrimination lawsuit for charging non-white customers higher interest on car loans. (I only heard about it as a potential person in the class, not because it happened to me. I bought my car in Maryland, not Virginia, but it doesn’t make me look favorably on that business.) I have avoided them for the last 4 years because of this but my own safety is paramount and usurps any other greater principle I might have. (Hence also my comment around MLK Day about there still being a lot of fixing to be done. There are still bad things that happen to us because we aren’t white, male, perfect English speakers, etc.)

In my desperation, I went to this shop anyway and they were able to fix my car as a walk-in at 4pm. I was able to pick up my car by 7pm, but I paid quite a lot for the work.

It was about $70 for the new assembly pieces for the signals themselves. Then it was another $150 for the labor, and an additional charge for the new Virginia state auto repair labor tax. Yep. Because my genius of a governor, for whom I voted, cannot get a steady stream of revenue for the state, he got creative and there was the stupid penalty tax on driving unsafely and some other new taxes like the auto repair labor tax.

If only my car aficionado friends had free time earlier in the week, I could have picked up the assembly piece and had someone install it for me for free or the price of dinner. I spent about $250-270, but my reasoning in not waiting any longer for someone to be available was that ~$250 is cheaper than $1000 deductible on an actual accident and any other increase to my insurance rates. Your own mileage my vary on this kind of thinking, but there you have it. One repair in 2008 that is still far less than a car payment.

I have a huge bummer. On Valentine’s Day, after work, I went back to Ann Taylor with my receipt for 2 suits. There is a sale on suits where the jacket is 50% off. Thinking I could get a price adjustment, I took a receipt into the store and found out that they will only do a price adjustment within 14 days of purchase.

Bummer. I thought it was a 30-day policy, not 14.

Just so you know. Flip that receipt over, read it as you walk out the door. Then you’ll know.

U-G-L-Y, at least I have an alibi! It’s UGLY! It’s UGLY!

It’s been so ugly, and I’ve been busy, that I’ve been ignoring the update till now. I have lost a lot of money in the market in all my investment accounts.

I have added almost $5k in medical debt, but it I have a pending account receivable associated with it. I will not accounted for the reimbursement yet on my net worth calculations until I submit my papers.

My credit card debt is stagnating at the moment. But since 2008 is focused on debt payment, I’m most worried about this one and reining in my spending.

My real estate assessment has lost some value, good because it reduces my tax bll, but bad because it also hits my small net worth pretty hard.