Security Deposits are a Funny Thing

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Or a depressing thing, depending on your credit, I suppose!

I remember being quite frustrated four years ago when we moved into the house that we’re leaving now upon finding that despite not having paid any security deposits whatsoever for the previous two apartments I’d lived in, moving only a few miles over the county line subjected us to all sorts of new policies and apparently trust issues that meant the power and water companies both wanted deposits from us in order to setup new service. At the time, I believe electricity was $295 and water was $145.

So fast-forward to the present day and I’ve been a little nervous, but at least more prepared with regards to how to deal with the deposits this time around. Obviously I don’t want to pay them, but at least this time I budgeted for having to put down some money in the instance that the rules had gotten even more strict than last time.

Luckily, between credit checks (electric), a good referral (gas), and already having an existing account (water), no deposits will be required for this move.

Which I suppose is a pretty good thing, because out of morbid curiosity I asked anyways what the deposits would’ve been…

  • Electricity – $495
  • Water – $145 (same company as before)
  • Gas – $125

Yep – that’s $765 in security deposits just to get the utilities turned on!!!

Sure, I guess you could argue that if you can’t afford the bills, maybe you shouldn’t be renting there to begin with, as the deposits are based on a multiple of the average bills for the house, but still – talk about a rough start to moving if you’ve been less than studious about making sure your bills get paid on time every single month!

Let that be a lesson to anyone who thinks that just one day late shouldn’t really matter…

Thin Post : Junk Food Avoidance

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I hate to admit it, but I was really able to relate to this old post about fighting against junk food cravings that I found the other day from Get Rich Slowly blogger J.D. Roth.

It’s certainly nothing against J.D., mind you, but more so in that reading how he admits that he has no self control with relation to certain things (junk food being one of them), I can feel where he’s coming from because frankly, I guess that I’m the exact same way. My own worst enemy is potato chips – I can plow through an entire bag in two days time.

Well, technically less than 24 hours if I buy them one evening and carry over into the next.

I’ve tried on many occasions to convince myself to ration them by breaking a larger bag down into a bunch of smaller plastic containers, but that honestly only lasts for a few days before I finish off the rest of the bag on a particularly chaotic night before a deadline or something. I’ve even tried the snack pack-sized bags, which help to some extent … oddly enough not necessarily because of their size, but because they don’t make my favorite flavors in them, so I’m less likely to eat more than a mini bag or two in a sitting.

So it makes me a little sad to read a post like J.D.’s because I know I need to just do like he does and simply not have chips around the house – period. I know that it’s vital that I figure out how to make this happen because no matter how good I get into following my exercise routine and eating healthy, one really bad night with a bag of Doritos can basically wipe out an entire week’s worth of sweating and pushing myself, and that’s just a damn shame knowing how hard all of the other work is.

To touch on another point in the same article, I’ve been able to ween down eating out in the past by stating that as a reward, I’d allow myself the nicer meals like when we go over to Disney, but unfortunately there just aren’t very many alternatives for gourmet, high quality potato chips that I could enjoy in small quantities for being good! Chips are truly a junk food that I’ll consume in mass quantities if given the option, so avoidance is really the only way.

Is it worth giving up potato chips for an entire year to lose 50 pounds???

I think it might be. I’ve already given up diet soda, and three months ago that seemed impossible! Hmmmm – there might be a challenge here worth considering after all…

Moving, Part Deux

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So roughly two weeks later, the stack has gotten considerably larger, my office is looking quite vacant, and yet it still feels like we have so much left to go! Movers come next Saturday, which leaves us exactly five days left to finish packing the kitchen, dining room, living room, and our bedroom – and here we thought we were “doing good” by starting three weeks early…


I think it’s finally time for a new desk…


The mountain of boxes grows larger…


…and also this one…


On the upside, though, we finalized everything and got the keys for the new house today, and I’ve gotta say, boy are the fruits of this labor certainly going to be refreshing!

random glimpses of the Magic Kingdom

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I spent the better part of the evening going through six years worth of Disney photos for a new (old) project that I’m working on. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce it in a few weeks, pending I don’t drop in sheer exhaustion after the move, but in the meantime, here are a couple of my own personal favorites from around the Magic Kingdom…

language vs. the brain

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I know that this is old, but it’s one that I always get a kick out of when I see it getting circulated around the Internet. It’s amazing to me that the brain is adept enough to read so fluidly despite every single word being spelled wrong … makes me wonder why I bother spending so much time proofreading anymore!

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Survey Says … That Was Rude

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We are sorry, but unfortunately we have collected all the surveys we need from your particular demographic group. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Boy, is that one phrase that I really get tired of seeing … especially after I’ve decided to go out of my way to offer up a company my opinions that they’ve requested! This particular time it was for VistaPrint because I had the promo cards for my book printed by them last year. They did a good job and I’ll probably do my next batch with them as well, so I figured I’d take a minute to give them some feedback, plus I had a chance to win $100, too!

Five or six not exactly brief questions in, apparently they realized that they already had enough opinions like mine and abruptly ended the survey like they just stopped caring. Honestly, it’d be like having dinner with a friend, and then at one point just standing up and walking out the door because you’ve already heard that story about their cat three times before. But there’s nothing rude about that, right?

I honestly stopped doing most of the hotel surveys because so many of them end like this, and it even disappoints me to say that I’ve gotten this same response from Disney before as well. From a programming perspective, I don’t understand why they can’t set the thing up to continue collecting your information as normal and then just mark it as “extra” if they see that they’ve reached whatever quota they set. Why would you want to insult your customer by implying that their opinion is no longer important to you after they’ve already gone out of their way to help you out???

I have other rants about surveys, too – not putting enough thought into your questions, making them so loaded that I have to choose between extremes, even just expecting me to fill out 15 pages of radio buttons ranking every single thing your staff members do on a scale of 1 to 10 – but interrupting me mid-survey to say, “Meh – nevermind…” is definitely the best way to get me to never bother with your questionnaires ever again…

we be moving!

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So I guess I haven’t really mentioned the whole ordeal here yet, and I was somewhat reluctant to do so until everything was said and done for fear of jinxing it, but we officially signed our new lease over the weekend, gave our notice here, and now the house is a mess as it’s starting to get filled up with boxes … I guess the cat’s out of the bag now!

Awesome Pool House
Our biggest selling point and probably the main inspiration for us choosing this particular house, it’s got an awesome pool (with jacuzzi!) that we’re really looking forward to!!! Technically we made the decision to look because we feel like we need more space for some upcoming changes, and honestly until we found the listing we didn’t think that we’d ever find one even in our price range, but we really lucked out on this one. Looking forward to sharing some pics when we finally move in!

Luck of the Draw
I’ve got to say, it really is almost pure luck that we got this place. The listing went up late on a Wednesday night and I just happened to catch it Thursday morning on a whim. I almost didn’t bother even looking because the whole process had gotten really frustrating at that point, from the Nigerian scammers to rentals that were also still up for sale to old listings that just never got taken down – it had all gotten really draining and I can only imagine how much worse actually buying a house can be! Anyways, the pictures for this house were slim, but the photos of the pool sold it, so knowing how competitively it was priced, I knew that we had to act fast if we wanted a shot. We setup a viewing later that weekend, did some rental history homework to make the decision for the landlord a little easier, and literally called on the way home after the viewing to confirm our interest because there were other people viewing the place at the same time!

All of that took place the weekend before last, we spent last week going through background checks and working on the lease, and as of Sunday it had been signed by both parties and we were officially moving out. And then the chaos began…

The Dustier Side of Moving
As I write this, we have 21 days left in this house and we take possession of the new house in 16 days. Yeah … we have a little over two weeks to pack up our entire lives and be ready to move! Actually, it’s still a lot, but I honestly feel like we’re doing better than we did last time because before we pretty much left the bulk of our packing until the day we actually had the moving truck parked outside. This time we’re trying to get it all done in advance, and we’re even making efforts to throw out/donate a lot of junk that we no longer need, too – earlier I carried 8 bags of crap out to the curb for garbage, and my bet is that we’ll double or triple that by the time that we’re finally done!

By the end of the weekend we’re hoping to have a lot of the packing and most of the painting done, so there’s a lot of work ahead of us, but we’re trying to focus on that bubbling hot tub at the end of the rainbow!



This is merely the beginning of Mount St. Boxmore…


Those that were empty shall soon become full…


The first time we’ve seen the back wall of this closet in, oh, about three and a half years!


More photo fun to come as the move progresses, so stay tuned!

also, about Final Fantasy: The After Years!

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So I guess I’ve probably got about 5 hours in now, total, and part of that was re-doing a section after I died and forgot to save. Ultimately, I guess I’m not quite sure what I think of it just yet – I mean, it’s great to see all of my favorite characters from the old classic, but at the same time it’s tough to tell if the plot is actually going somewhere or if it was just slapped together to rekindle an old flame.

Part of this may be due to how it’s setup – it’s not simply one game from start-to-end, but actually a series of about 10 different modules that combine to form an episodic storyline. I just completed the main / first episode (focused around Ceodore and Kain … I didn’t complete the “Challenge Dungeon” yet, though), and next will be Rydia’s Tale. I’m hoping that one has a little more umph than this one did – a lot of the characters were really weak, so it kinda felt like combat took forever.

I am still hopeful, though, as I noticed when I analyzed this earlier that unfortunately most of the other RPGs that I’d be interested in are on the DS and I just don’t think that I can handle the tiny screen for that length of time. Not sure when the next time I’ll get to play might be, for a number of reasons that I’ll get more excited about in a few days, but then again, maybe that’s actually a benefit to the episodic play? We’ll see!