June 2009

Over budget!

June 15, 2009

Lordie! So far am I over this month’s budget, I’ve given up trying to restrain the spending. As usual when I decide to indulge myself early in the budget cycle with a sorta expensive but affordable purchase, every damnfool thing that costs money to fix has popped up or gone wrong.  To start with, I [...]

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The long, slow death of journalism

June 14, 2009

This may not be visible to those of you who view the New York Times Magazine online, but today the Times downsized the magazine’s print version in a big and ominous way. They’ve cut the trim size (the issue’s physical height and width) and, to accommodate the smaller pages, have switched to an eye-straining smaller [...]

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Pedro’s Curry

June 13, 2009

When I lived in Saudi Arabia back in the Dark Ages, Indian, Goanese, and Pakistani workers would get workers’ visas so they could come on as domestics for American and British oil company employees. Pedro was a Pakistani man who worked as a cook for our friends the Dakers.  Pedro was a past master of concocting [...]

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Mormons to the rescue!

June 13, 2009

Thank heavens! Just as SDXB is about to leave town, abandoning his feckless daughter (let’s call her Pauline, as in “Perils of…”) to deal alone with AHCCCS (Arizona’s ungenerous answer to Medicaid), the Department of Economic Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, another pending eviction, the usual array of angry creditors, and [...]

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Thermostat update

June 13, 2009

Yesterday morning Matt the Air-conditioning Tech called to discuss the thermostat issue. By then I had finally managed to figure out the trick of programming the thing, evidently quite the trick, since one of the instructions he gave me over the phone was wrong. If an expert can’t work it, I don’t feel like such [...]

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Figuring out what you want to be when you grow up: The Prioritizer!

June 12, 2009

Two of my favorite PF bloggers are contemplating the fine points of goal-setting. J.D. at Get Rich Slowly introduces a reader’s plea for direction in a project to overcome debt and then asks readers how they accomplish a seemingly unsurmountable task. Meanwhile, Paid Twice, whose whole blog is the story of a goal, trots out [...]

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