April 2010

Head-banging in the corporate bureaucracy

April 25, 2010

Godlmighty! Yesterday I realized that Fidelity never sent my April 403(b) drawdown. So now on Monday I have to try AGAIN to get those people off the dime. What torture! I just hate bureaucratic runarounds. I hate them even more when the bureaucracy is private instead of governmental. At least with the government the employees [...]

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Only a slightly nightmarish day…

April 24, 2010

Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche features a very beautiful chicken soup, comfort food she cooked up after an extraordinarily rough week.  Meanwhile, Frugal Scholar, feeling a little anxious after links to her site in Funny’s recently gone-viral post pulled traffic upward there, too, also covets comfort food, in her case a lush-sounding [...]

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Buyer Beware: A close look at the bill

April 24, 2010

So this bill for $587 came in the mail from the air-conditioning company. This outfit is a small, locally owned company with whom I’ve done business for upwards of 12 years. To my knowledge, they’ve never cheated me. Or so I thought. The company that used to service my AC would send a guy twice [...]

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Two hectic—and expensive!—days

April 24, 2010

Good grief, these past two days have been hectic! And expensive: I’ve mortgaged my patrimony to renew my wardrobe. The state sent me a notice saying I had to get a new photo for my driver’s license. Some time back, the State of Arizona decided testing and retesting people for driver’s licenses was just too [...]

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Summertime, and…what am I gonna do, anyway?

April 21, 2010

Only another half-dozen class meetings until the end of the semester. Then a blitz of monster student papers, and then…and then…white-hot silence. For the first time in many a year, I’m looking at an entire three-month summer break with nothing to do. Even when I was in graduate school and couldn’t take summer classes because [...]

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Moments of Fame

April 20, 2010

Many thanks to everyone who sent guest posts while I was laid up with a shoulder dislocation! Since they were all good posts, I sent them off to the various blog festivals and round-ups. Here’s the result: At the Festival of Frugality, hosted by Beating Broke, Budgeting in the Fun Stuff‘s “Can Minimizing Go Too [...]

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