Saving log - $8 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $5 lunch

Got a form letter from Capital One this evening. They've gotten rid of the $29 late fee. Because its a form letter doesn't say whether they are moving the closing date back to the 15th; the next paragraphs were just a note that if you got a late fee, you did these two horrible things - yadda yadda yadda. I got most of my loaf - the slices that cost me money. I'll take it as "Go and sin no more".

The first round of temp staff has arrived, putting some energy in our sleepy doings downstairs. I overheard that they should make friends with me "because I fix problems".

At least I fixed mine.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $15 chirashi lunch + $25 poker game

Paycheck came - yes, I am making $50 more/ paycheck, or $100 more a month. It justifies my raising my savings rate to $50/ each paycheck.

This evening, I played Texas Hold 'Em poker with lawyer friend, lawyer friend's partner (who works as IT support in a law firm), and 5 lawyers up on the 48th floor in downtown Seattle. Man that sounds like the setup for a punch line. I lost, of course. It was fun, but pricey, so it will be a once in awhile thing. Cracking the poker game and winning isn't cheap - $20 buy-in, $5 bounty (if you lose all your chips, you pay the person who dealt.)

And no, that is not the frugal dilemma, this is:

A couple of week's worth of Wall Street Journals, Investor Business Dailys., and a Barron or two. Stealing is not right, neither is littering...but recycling is a virtue. I was sorely tempted to take a Thursday or a Friday's paper. I didn't, but there it is...

Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $7 lunch (for 2 days)

Its a little tight for the end of this month, with a paycheck at the end of the week, and I'll have a couple of lunch meetings that I have to make and I need to save some money for. Today I did the footlong sub, gnaw on it for 2 days trick. Then, even with the two lunches out I should make the end of the month with about $60 to spare.

I looked at my Capital One credit card bill and I got the late fee charge again. The customer service guy was rude, but he did tell me where to send a written letter to dispute my charge (I double checked on the website - who knows what they teach customer service people nowadays?) and fax number. What is happening is that I've gotten in the habit of paying on the 20th when my bill closes on the 15th. Now my bill closes on the 20th, so when I pay my bill on the 20th, it might get posted to the previous month, making me just under the wire.

I faxed the letter and mailed it. There is no innocence about it - I was mad enough just to be straightforward, clipped, and direct. I gave them six months worth of data, told them why I was mischarged, and told them what I want to happen (shift my bill to close on the 15th). I have to say that I don't hold much hope here - when Cap One's mortgage business went under, it means they will grab money with both hands, customer be damned. Luckily the late fee is the only charge on it. If they aren't reasonable, I cut up the card and hand it to them.

We were going to go Saturday to lawyer friend's house on the coast of Washington (Hoquiam, to be exact) to paint and barbeque and get a change of scenery.

Unfortunately, we met up with a traffic jam to Fife, Washington (outside of Tacoma). A rollover accident causing 7 car pileup happened about 30 minutes before, blocking all the lanes. The State Patrol opened up the turnout, and we turned around and went back to Seattle.

On the way, we called lawyer friend, who got the whole story from someone else's call. Paint and barbeque canceled.

It was pretty disappointing, but it could have been worse. We got a late start, so the rollover definitely could have been on us had we gotten 30 minute earlier start.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $0

Did it. Got one of my few no-spend days.

Used the Starbucks card to "buy" my 12 oz drip coffee (drank it black...no, no, no I want cream with it tomorrow), and I ate - gorged - at the office picnic. I shouldn't have had that piece of cake with frosting. Tasted great while I was eating it but it really, really got me even an hour afterwards. To think that as a little kid I used to enjoy that much cake preferentially going after the frosting.

DJ friend drove me home, but I could have also taken the bus.

Saving log - $2 tip box (have to pick up the pace for this month)
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $9 lunch

Got my first paycheck with the raise - $50 more each paycheck, $100/month. I get paid on the last business day and on the 15th of the month (earlier if the 15th is on the weekend). No three payperiod months for me.

Added $50 to my recurring savings at ING, 50$ to my recurring savings at my brick & mortar bank, and tried out online bill paying for my new credit card (the one I've transferred the trainer and the newspaper charges).

The office picnic is for tomorrow (Thursday) lunch, and the co worker that I worked with for that hour and a half last Friday offered to take me to lunch Friday. I'm going to team it up with buying morning coffee with my Starbucks card and attempt two no-spend days in a row. Cross my fingers that I can do it!

Saving log - $3 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $7 lunch + $20 chiropractor

Sister called. She got my $14K money transfer this morning, so it looks like it takes an average of 5 business days. Good to know; good to know that the checks for solar panel installation and the electrical rewiring won't bounce.

The chiropractor told me that he adjusted my first trainer the other day (first trainer brought me to the chiropractor when I had a lot of trouble doing some of the moves). My first trainer is selling cars now an has put on a few pounds. So we've gone full circle - whatever I'm losing he's gaining.

So Duvall friends told me they had no ripe blueberries...


And they swore they had no ripe huckleberries...Cripes, this is the most huckleberries ever I've seen on a bush. I must not get out all that often, I guess.


The Duvall friends were interested in doing pickles and marmalade. Are you crazy! I told them that berry jam is easy with no botulism potential. And the quick pickle steps usually had the "put in salted ice water for hours" step, which means canning the next day. The only problem with the jam is what couple can really go through a quart of jam in a reasonable time and without an insulin shot?

So we picked up some pint jars in addition to the quarts we got from the other friend. They'll use the quarts in the next few weeks. I showed them what you look for when you go through jars. We got one bad cracked one, one with a rough spot on the rim (I use those, but that one gets opened and put in the refrigerator after canning), and one mayo jar. No mayo jars as a canning jar for me.

We picked berries for a couple of hours, doing grizzly bear style picking - stripping the berries, rather than picking each one. For the huckleberries it still meant a lot of stripping for a small volume and it meant a lot of cleaning of leaves, berry stems, bugs, overdone fruit. My advice: use a fair amount of water. Leaves float, and the overripe stuff tends to sink and dissolve. Still it took about an hour to clean and pick.

The first step is to measure, which is a bit of a craft, because if you pack them down, you change the volume. This is 4 cups of blackberries, 7 cups of blueberries, 2 cups of huckleberries.


We made two batches of jam - 6 pints of a blueberry huckleberry lemon combo with added pectin, and 6 pints of a straight cooked-down blackberry blueberry number with sugar. The Duvall friends took lots of notes, but they did fade in and out, something you can't do during canning. Something about hot boiling water and hot boiling sugar that keeps you on task.

Here's the waterbath canner in action, steam surrounding it.


The batches of jam. Blackberry on the left, huckleberry/blueberry on the right.


Turns out that the added pectin number did something strange. It passed my fork test for jam, which means that it would jam up, but it seems jammy at the top and syrupy at the bottom. Tastes fantastic though. The cooked jam number took forever and ever to cook - it never really fully passed the fork test - but it jammed up nicely in the jar. Tastes great, but blackberry is always stronger than blueberry in my book.

Spent Friday night and Saturday in Duvall Washington, at the north edge of the county. The Duvall friends invited us to the tractor fair Saturday morning and early afternoon. Not only did it harken back to a more frugal time, it was a blast!

This is an International Harvestor (IH) tractor M - a tractor that my dad had and "Nut" borrowed as a ransom. This one is in far, far better condition.


These weren't just for show - they had to run enough to participate in a parade and some, for a tractor pull. This is one of the oldest tractors restored and running - a 1919 Allis Chalmers.


The 1919 tractor with one of the newest tractors - from 1981.


It wasn't just tractors - any old engine or gas fired appliance that could be restored seemed to appear. This is a gas powered washer. You primed the beast using the pedals at the bottom.


And a more detailed shot of the gas iron. Inside the base of the iron was a pilot light! To a farm wife, the question "did I leave the iron on?" had a whole new dimension.

And yet it does. I had my day off today, but I did a favor for a coworker, which only took 90 minutes.

After that, it was at the tail end of lunch. I went to my favorite hideout place at the Pike Market. No debit, credit card or check - just cash, so I checked my wallet. Whoops - I needed cash. There was an ATM about 30 ft from the hideout, but was traditionally a US Bank ATM, which if I used would be a $1.75 surcharge. Sigh. But I wanted my meal so I was prepared to pay - grr.

I got there and the ATM had changed to a WaMu. My bank; no fee; yippee! Weird how I care so much about paying or not paying a $1.75. It does mean that I don't have to plan ahead so thoroughly.

Packed up all my canning supplies for the weekend. See ya!

Saving log - $5 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $25 lunch

We took lawyer friend out on his birthday, so that's why the lunch $ were freakishly high. We went to the all-you-can eat Brazilian restaurant that we took DH's family to last summer. "Meat fest" we called it. It did throw a loop out of my simple strategy for handling all you can eat places:

Avoid the brown and white foods, eat as much as you want of the brightly colored ones.

I got one plate of bright colored stuff - and then it was dark brown beef and white pork all the way.

Tomorrow I'm off, but not quite off. I'll be helping a co worker out of the office for an hour or so. Right now its just waiting, waiting, waiting for what the new paycheck will hold - its the first one with the 4.5% raise.

This weekend DH and I will be sleeping over at our friend's place in Duvall for the tractor fair, market, and all you can eat breakfast. Again, the simple strategy is not going to work. Hash browns, sausage, bacon, pancakes, syrup, eggs ... all brown or white.

We'll go to the fair for a little bit, and then I'll hold class on waterbath canning. The blackberries are not ready, so we'll be making pickles and marmalade. Not in the same jar!

and you're not sick of me yet?

This is probably a TMI post, a bit on the level of showing a pic of underwear strung in a hotel bathroom...

I'll give those who want to bail out now the ability to do so.



Ready?



Pardon the coyness here. My subject line refers to Murphy's Law, and that during a certain time of life Mrs. Murphy confronted Murphy's Law every month. Matter of fact, Mrs. Murphy had a corollary: let your 15 yr old daughter use her own money to buy that pair of white pants.

Well, I missed my period this month. When you are 45 there are two big reasons for missing it and so a couple of days ago I picked up a couple of fine Western blot stick tests to do a little self pre-diagnosis.

To keep this financial and to be a little comic about the whole thing, it turns out that the pregnancy stick test costs $8, while the menopause stick test costs $6.50 ($13 for 2). Already with the senior discounts!

Nix on the pregnancy; probable yes on the menopause. It would appear that I've gone from pre- to peri-, and while it's useful - now I know why the summer nights seem just a tad warmer to me - its just a little disorienting. An occurrence that I planned for (and yet still surprised me sometimes) and marked time with for over 30 years is slowly going away.

But I'm not going to miss the expense of it - those downtown sundries stores for the girly emergencies are a total ripoff! Now where was that craft page...?

Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $5.50 lunch

Did actually make it to the all staff meeting this morning. It happens once per month - last month I blew it off to deposit a chunk of inheritance. Lunch was the 403B meeting, and yes, the board of our non-profit dropped the retirement slightly and increased the match slightly to compensate. Its a strategy to insure that more employees put more into the 403B. It will happen starting in January 2008. And it is a trend because the board will be looking at it every year and assessing whether to keep shifting the ratio of match to retirement money. I guess I should yawn about it, because at 15%, it would have to be the 8% match 1% retirement ratio before I'm affected.

A couple of co workers got a bit bent out of shape though, the ones that are going from paycheck to paycheck but putting in 6%. I feel for them, but sometimes fiscal surprises come from the most innocent of places. And I'm thinking, wow, I didn't hit me that my workplace currently pays everyone working there more than a year 6% in a retirement fund. Many, many places they pay nothing - its all you.

Got a phone call from my sister at the bank. She's setting up our joint account, so we can both deposit money in. The banker asked me for a couple of pieces of sensitive information, then told me, "since you don't have a driver's license..."

Me: "What? I have a driver's license. I just don't drive. I have a chauffeur."

Anyway, the banker's setting things up and we should be good to go on a joint account for the farmette.

My good phone call was clearing up a late fee charge on my credit card. I paid on 5/18, 6/20, and 7/19. How do you get a late fee from that? The only hitch was trying to get out of voice jail and into an operator. I tried a couple of times, then I hit on reporting Fraud choice. Heck, said late fee charge looks like fraud. The customer rep was nice about the whole thing and told me that I should see the fix tomorrow.

I'll look tomorrow.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $10 lunch, coffee + $105 Fry's + $6 movie tickets + $9 groceries

Went over to Fry's to get a cooling fan for my laptop. About a year ago, an odd little bruise appeared on my right front thigh. It wasn't a bruise - it was a burn mark from my laptop! I mean really if you can't put your laptop on your lap, why is it called a laptop?

Now I set my laptop on a little table with grooves and in setting that on my lap it gave my little burn mark a chance to heal. It still gets a bit warm under the laptop and that can't be good especially during the summer when the air's already warm. Both DH and DJ friend suggested the laptop cooler.

I bought a laptop cooler today at Fry's for $49, also bought DH's birthday gift and couple of electronic cleaners.

It ends up that I'm typing this and other entries with quite a stack of contraptions - the little table with grooves, then the cooler with the fan, then the laptop itself.

Saw Hot Fuzz at the Crest tonight. Very, very funny! DH and I were trying to figure out the last time we went to a movie.

Saving log - $3 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $9 lunch +$13 Fred Meyer

Ever since I photographed that penny stuck in the blacktop, I've been averaging finding a penny/day. The least likely place that I found a penny was in front of my neighborhood ATM machine. Too busy collecting those 2 twenties to notice the cent at your feet?

My little fiscal project for the summer was to move my 3 recurring monthly charges from my credit card to my debit card, because I found out this spring my credit card was going to increase the interest rate on deadbeats from 9% to 12%.

ISP - $19.95/month - moved to debit
Netflix - $10.88/month - moved to debit
NYT newspaper - $49/month (will increase beginning next week) - still on credit.

Not that I hadn't tried to get the third one off. Its weird, but the NYT customer service told me over the phone that my card must be a credit card, not a debit card. Doesn't matter if it has the little Mastercard logo on it, no sirree bub, picky about the plastic.

I suspect that the NYT has an old validation algorithm. All credit cards have them, because they are supposed to have valid and invalid numbers in fairly random patterns. Think about it. If you gave out credit cards in sequential order, it would mean that you wouldn't have to steal a number - pick any number and you could steal anyone's credit. Anyway, I suspect that debit cards use a different algorithm and the NYT just doesn't have them.

I'll move the NYT to my bank credit card, along with charging the trainer's time. If nothing else, it consolidates a couple of accounts. I plan to keep the old credit card account open, but not use it.

Made a little purchase at Fred Meyer - something that would have been sci-fi to me 2 years ago - I bought lifting gloves for gym. Yesterday, even though the gym was air conditioned, my palms were sweating so much that the bars were slippery and it was difficult to grip. The weights I'm using for the upper body are in the (drumroll) 60-70 lb range. Not like you can tell by looking at me!

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $20 chiropractor + $5 curry lunch

Sister called me at work. The final hurdle for the sale of the second piece of land was that the town council had to approve it. It went through without a hitch. Apparently they approved it in about 2 seconds, sister said.

I expect that the estate will be finalized rapidly now, within a couple of months.

Sister went with her insurance agent, and paid the insurance for the farmette. We are now joint owners of the farmette. We talked a bit about getting a joint account in both sister's and my names, just in case sister got struck by lightening or something, and then we talked about plans.

I had to catch her a bit. She's having the foundation on the house redone for $5000. The site assessment for the solar panels came in at about $400 (a copy is to be sent to me), and they are interested in selling sister two lines of solar panels, each for $30K! Apparently there is a rebate of $4K/line, but I still had to remind her that she has now mentally spent $60K!

I'm not saying bad, I said, I'm saying be aware and slow down. Two big projects - tops - per year, so you can keep an eye on the work. Part of the usefulness of the joint account is that it provides a natural budget line. Put a certain amount in yearly and don't add more upon the pain of death. And I was thinking somewhere around 25K for each of us this year!

I also told her that I thought that the slowing real estate market would work somewhat to our advantage - a contractor with no jobs will start to work lean and pay attention to us. We could get a better deal somehow. We would be small, but we could keep someone eating next year.

I feel like the bean counter/ emotional brake/ killjoy here. I want this to work out. I want my sister to be happy. I don't want to be taken for a ride. And if sister buys me out in 5 years I at least don't want to lose too much money.

So last week we had the Duvall friends over for dinner and Paris pics. They have a few acres, ducks, chickens, a little garden. They also will have a lot of blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. And they want to have a berry picking/ processing party and learn to can.

Well, I'm a pro at waterbath canning, and the possibility of whipping up a few dozen Christmas gifts (jam, sauce, syrup) is highly appealing. So I'm coming with the waterbath canner, the racks, funnel, magnetic lid grabber, recipes, and know-how.

Tonight we had another set of friends that we hadn't seen in a couple of years. Lo and behold, while the late July - early August didn't work for them, they have several dozen canning jars to contribute. A couple will come back filled as a thank you.

Now for the lids and the sugar. Grocery store time. You just don't want to teach people bad habits, and reusing lids is a bad habit. The seal doesn't form right.

The Duvall friends also want to learn to pressure can. We need another friend for later!

Yesterday, I made my first political contribution. $100.

The day before, during the co worker going away lunch, I sat next to another co worker who I had worked with off and on for about 6 years (right now, off). I was pleasantly surprised to find out two things - 1.) he lived fairly close, in the Licton Springs/Northgate neighborhood (another North Seattle neighborhood) 2.) he was running for the Seattle school board.

I found out some interesting things. It costs about $30,000 to run a school board campaign, and currently he has about $2000. He has nearly got a website up and running which means that he can take PayPal, however, he's running into a chicken and egg problem (needs money to get the website up, but the average high-tech Seattlite is loath to write a check). We had interesting chat about the Supreme Court decision against the Seattle Public Schools.

I asked him for more information, he provided it, I wrote him a check large enough so that I'm memorable. I consider it my version of Prosper.com. We'll see what happens next.

I also promised to link his campaign site to my blog. I'm only going to link it to Sites I Frequent so as not to be too obtrusive. (this blog's about me, darn it!) If you are reading me from North Seattle, check the link out.

Saving log - $5 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $5.45 lunch

Nothing, nothing, nothing happened today. I mean I always think of something to write about, but today absolutely nothing financial happened to me. (Okay, when I got back from an hour of gym, I got 22 messages, all from a fax machine.) So little has happened today that all I'm going to do is post the image, tell a story, and get outta here.

Its summer, and the poppies are out...


Which reminds me of a story.

Back in the 80s, I went to a housewarming party in West Seattle. It was a charming little place, tiny front yard with a little deck, and a high fence. I went into the backyard and came chest to face with a clump of 4 foot high red poppies, the flower and ovary capsule swelled up the size of a baseball. The real (ahem, illegal to grow in the US) thing, if you know what I mean. I remarked on it to the new owner ... how could I not? He smiled and told me that when he moved in the entire garden was comprised of two plants - these huge poppies, and dill (!) While he enjoyed opium poppies as well as the next knowledgable non-DEA agent, he wanted a little more variety. So he dug all of the dill and most of the poppies out and composted them.

A couple of days later, some of the older neighbors came to visit, and were very, very disappointed to find that the new owner had dug most everything out. It turns out that the old owner was the daughter of a Chinese missionary and used to make a "medicinal tea" with the poppy leaves. The neighbors remembered with a certain amount of fondness that they would all sit around, sipping tea and dreaming about how they would renovate the kitchen.

So I say to you ... if you want to get away with something, have a good story. Don't want your opium den busted? Invite your neighbors over for tea and dreams.

The credit card check got posted to my account. I'm caught up, with about $60 in total debt. Hah.

I have about $300 left in my checking account to last me 4 days, so I put in another $150 into my Paypal account, which is in itself paying 5.02% interest. If I have $300 in checking by this time of the month its really not doing me any good. I'd much prefer $100 - $150.

Will be seeing what this paycheck is going to look like - I couldn't get a fix on the last paycheck because it has retro pay on it. With the pay raises, I plan on hiking up the monthly amounts I put into savings. How much depends on what I see in the next paycheck.

My newspaper subscription is going up by an estimated $3/month.

the lawyer friend's partner (lfp). Just the two of us. Lawyer friend is on the east coast. We went to a 20 yr favorite place of mine - my hideout - and chatted about blogging.

Blogging is such a weird activity, when you think about it.

Are you writing for you, audience be dammed, or are you writing for a following?

What if nothing happens that day? Or if you only like posting 1-2 entries/ day, what if a lot happens?

How anonymous, that is, how descriptive should you be? Lively descriptions and observations make for good reading, but it makes it easy for the real life people to find themselves. Then if an entry is heartfelt - when the word gets out, klablam! Actually, if a blog gets big enough, that issue gets a little easier. Imagine pawing through 502 entries of mine to get to the 1 entry that I skewer you. Just ignore that search button. Please.

And on top of that, it does take a certain strange dogged quality to keep these logs up.

At the end, I bought, which is why I logged in a $20 lunch. lfp will have my back at the next lunch.

Saving log - $1
Spending log - $1.25 coffee + $7 lunch

A mostly workplace entry.

Got a note from the payroll person that there was a possibility that I was underpaid in the retro pay. I emailed back that what I got was a bit higher but pretty close to what I thought I was getting. Turns out she got over excited.

And I still get asked whether I use my science degree. Of course I do - I make predictions and then I test them. I'm sometimes right, even.

I missed my chiropractor appointment - the night before, I read an article on MSNBC about neck adjustments and freaked. Took me a couple of days to reconcile the article with my experience. Used my science degree for that one, too.

Every quarter we can adjust our 403B withholdings. What with the promotion and a new upward salary adjustment I shot the moon and went for 15%.

And right now I know of two other co workers who are leaving, 1 a surprise, 1 not. Lawyer friend is back east with his dad.

The Internet radio station is up and running!

I couldn't resist! I can't imagine that I even had 500 things to say...

Saving - $5 tip box
Spending log - $0

Actually, I spent $5 on myself by putting it in the tip box, hah hah. Today, the department treated our newest member to a lunch, so lunch was covered. I was going to go and get my typical coffee and milk, but I thought about it and decided to go with workplace coffee with creamer with my breakfast bar. Not the healthiest and tastiest, but its time to take advantage and convert a low spend day into a no spend day.

DJ friend is so, so, so close. The logging works properly, but every so often the sound card gets wonky when you try and control it remotely. In other words, try not to control it at work.

Got a letter from Vanguard. I have enough money in it and took the all electronic route so I'm not going to be charged fees. Yippee!

Sister and her partner sent me the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. 15 pages in and I'm already engrossed.

My poem did not make it onto the Seattle buses this year. Ah well.

Saving log - $6
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $8 lunch

Thought I would take a break from the Paris pics to list what is currently going on:

Taking over all of the little functions as a supervisor - time cards, approving time off, reporting who is out, sitting in on the evaluations, planning to move some of my duties onto them. Tomorrow the plan is to determine whether my two staffers are interested in 1-on-1 meetings or not.

I found, to my surprise and delight, that the promotion came with a 5% pay raise, its retroactive from the paycheck before the trip, and is separate from a raise coming from a decent evaluation. And I get evaluated tomorrow.

My lower back locked up, so the chiropractor claimed, and I gained approximately .4 lbs during Paris. Or maybe not. I told the trainer that I didn't do any of the upper body drills in Paris. She didn't seem all that upset; she was positively chipper as she put me through an exercise routine that made me regret not doing the drills.

Ate the cheese I brought back (thank you customs dog for giving me a break), and brought chocolates to work. Found out that it only took 1 week for the postcards to travel from Paris. I sent three postcards back with no writing, just a Jackson Pollock induced spray of coffee cup rings. Lawyer friend is still talking about his. Hey, anything you write from Paris on a postcard is going to be banal...why not say everything by saying nothing?

Something odd happened to my PayPal account - I saw two mysterious transactions. I emailed PayPal, they refunded the money and locked up my account. I figured that now's the time to change all my financial passwords.

At least the house was clean. But about $110 left from the trip went nearly poof.

Haircut - $16
Groceries - $51
Drugstore - $11 (DH put our toothpaste in his carry-on heading out to Paris; I shook my head - TSA took it away at the airport, so we used mine of the approved size)
2 lunches - $25 (good old comfort food at a place next to the post office depot our mail was held at. We got the held mail, sorted and dealt with it, all while the food was made. The best way to deal with two weeks of mail.)

Then laundry.

Then a quick pitstop at work to shovel through 180 emails for the obviously useless ones. I could do it at home, but I just don't like doing this at home. I try to keep home at home and work at work. Found out that my postcard mailed to the office actually made it before I did.

Then sleep. Last night I didn't get the semi-dream/semi-hallucination of me sleeping in my hotel bed in the middle of L'Avenue de Opera that I got the night before. Yippee!

Sunday
Saving log - $0
Spending log - $4 bagel, coffee + $20 sweater wrap


So an interesting piece of trip karma happened this morning at the coffeeshop. I opened up my Sunday paper and found that it was last week's. Never happened to me before. I really didn't want to buy a paper, but I wanted something to read, so I grabbed a book and discovered it was one of those bookcrossing.com books. Read it, then release me ... somewhere. In that case, I just have to take it to Paris, and release it there.

I'm now 85% packed. I've gotten the final thing I was looking for - a black dressy scarf sweater wrap for a cool evening. I'm going for one bag, all the clothes I'm bringing are solid colors in white, black, beige, gray, red, jeans. Okay, a dark green top made it in, but everything matches everything else. Tried everything on - it all fits. Packed it up and I have space.

Super glued the catches of the day bag I'm taking to secure them from a snatch and grab. Shined the shoes. Put the hotel address in the bag I'm checking in. Took pictures of the checked bag so I have it on my digital camera.

I'm so excited now! 4 days and I'm going to be in Paris.

The image today was one I took on Friday. So mysterious, so short story-ish.

Saving log - $6
Spending log - $.65 milk + $5 magazine + $7 lunch

Found another dime near the curb in the street. Right now its just waiting - quietly not spending, figuring out what expenses are automatically deducted during last half of the month so that I don't overspend and bounce stuff here in Seattle, held my mail, donated my newspaper.

And then more waiting - submitted my poem to the Poetry on the Buses competition last week on the deadline. Interesting that the selection committee's an even number - I'd think that it ensure a deadlock decision.

Got a call from the trainer that we'll be back at it tomorrow.

I figured that you all would be imaged out so its just words today.

If you are interested, the internet radio station I've been doing some work for is nearly ready. This weekend and next week DJ friend is testing the server and is broadcasting a bit. If you're interested, follow the link under Sites I Enjoy, wait after the little flash thingee, hit the button Tune In, and hit Server 1.

Right now its working for most sound programs - Real Audio, iTunes, QuickTime, WinAmp...everything except Windows Media.