It's been a hellish few weeks. I've had bright spots and good times mixed in, but things have been really hard lately. My birthday last week was really great -- a lot of good friends came out to celebrate and we had a lovely time doing escape rooms and drinking fancy whiskey at the Multnomah Whiskey Library. Then Saturday was DASH, which was also a ( Read more... )

Hey y'all. My friend Eric launched a startup called WeFinance recently. It went live today, and I have one of the first listings on the site. It's a simple premise: you can loan money (to your friends, or anyone with a listing on the site), and you get paid back with interest. But it's lower interest than a person will get on a conventional loan, ( Read more... )

McKenzie and I are making a real effort to track our budget these days. We make enough money, but somehow we don't have enough money. So I'm attacking that problem Weight-Watchers-style and tracking everything. To that end, I'm trying to be realistic about travel. In years past, cheap tickets for long flights were always appealing because all those ( Read more... )

4 pages done. 5 more due tonight. 10 more due before I disconnect on Monday morning. Doable, but bleh. I'm really making it hard on myself by not just charging straight through it all, but I don't feel like it. I had a talk with McKenzie last night about how freelancing does this to me. How it's good that I took a more regular job, where I can ( Read more... )

I woke up this morning feeling fine. Then I got to work and my left eye was suddenly all blurry. It didn't go away and there was nothing in it, so I posted to Facebook, and everyone was like "that could be serious, get it checked out." I called a vision clinic near my office, described the condition, and the woman scheduled me an immediate ( Read more... )

McKenzie and I had a little talk about money this afternoon. I wrote before (in a locked entry) that our finances are fine, but we'd like to be saving more, and also neither of us can realistically expect to ever make significantly more in our jobs. The cold, hard truth is that the most realistic way for us to make an impact right now is for me to ( Read more... )

Now that I've been with my office for over a year, I'm eligible for the 401K, so our investment rep dude was here yesterday to set me up. He doesn't know I have a background in stock market analysis, so the first few minutes consisted of him giving me a remedial lesson on mutual funds. Then he just plowed straight into filling out my forms, and ( Read more... )

So it turns out the guy I hit is a lying jurkface.  Not only is he claiming $1000 in damages (I didn't even scratch his car one little bit!  NO dents! Even if the paint was scratched, a bumper paintjob is only $500 -- I know this, I'm in the biz, y'know), but he's claiming injuries now.  So I went ahead and turned it over to my insurance.  They'll ( Read more... )

A few days ago, I got the details on my friend Geoff's death.  He had been in the hospital with diabetes complications.  He had been in the ICU and needed to stay there...but he didn't have health insurance, and so he was discharged.  He died as soon as he got home.  Geoff had a good job and good income, but his diabetes precluded him from health ( Read more... )

I don't even know where I left off in the story.  I'm too tired to reread and relive it, so I'll just summarize.  Late last night, we heard that we wouldn't be able to get a traditional loan.  That was AFTER we were told we had 24 hours to get our final offer together for the house.  Another offer came in at the same time, and rather than have ( Read more... )