Personally, I'm not that into closets of any variety, but I will say that it's a nice enhancement to our house. Plus, I get the closet in our bedroom to myself. Now I can actually see some space between my hanging dress shirts. They aren't packed into a tiny silver at the end of the closet like they've been put in a trash compactor.
[This is the shoe and long hanging section.]Actually, it turned out to be a bit of an ordeal getting this closet set up. You have to go to The Container Store (yes, this is a real place), and work with an employee there to draw up a schematic, which they then deliver the pieces for and install (it's not cheap either). So first S did this without knowing the precise dimensions of our attic, just by guessing (which I'm on the record as saying was a bad idea at the time), and of course her estimates were way off, so she had to cancel the delivery and build a new schematic. This time she measured everything, and yet somehow still the plans called for shelves that were six feet too long (six feet!).
So the installer shows up and is like, "Uh... this isn't going to fit." I was the only one home, so I had to work with him in finding a place to install everything. Luckily he was pretty cool, and he more or less ditched the plans, and we kinda ad-libbed it. (I know that he's not supposed to do this. The proper way is to go back to the store and redraw the plans, which would've sucked ass, so I'm grateful he wasn't a stickler.) In the end, I think what we got is better than what was in the original plans anyway (S agrees), so all's well that ends well, but still... six feet off?! How does this happen? (I told S her punishment for making me deal with the installer while I was supposed to be working from home is that I get to mention this on my blog.)
In other news, I got a parking ticket a few weeks back that I'm fighting. DC has a system where you can challenge tickets online. The thing is, I probably (OK, definitely) was parked illegally, but, and this is a big but for me, I wasn't blocking anything. I was parked with the very tail end of my back bumper in a crosswalk (or rather where a crosswalk would be, one of the lines was partial wiped away), but everybody could still use the crosswalk. Pedestrians could easily get by, and the wheelchair divot / ramp in the curb was completely accessible. It's a case where I violated the letter of the law, but not the spirit, and it's my intention that a) the spirit is more important than the letter, and b) DC intentionally makes the letter of their minor laws difficult to follow and enforces them stringently, because it's a huge source of revenue for them.
Above is the diagram I submitted with my explanation. We'll see what happens. I have to admit that I exaggerated the position of my car a bit, I was more obviously in the crosswalk, but screw it. I wasn't hurting anything, I didn't do anything wrong, DC just wants my money. This is exactly the type of petty crap governments pull that pushes people toward things like the Tea Party and extreme libertarianism. Maybe I should start supporting Ron Paul.
Although, on the flip-side of that coin, I spent a solid 10 minutes yesterday bitching at the woman from Capital One about my credit card statement, not because it was wrong, but because the way they present everything, it is practically impossible to follow your credits and debits and easily see where your balance comes from. They just list your charges and then there is a balance at the top. There is no running balance for each of your charges (like in most statements), and there is no line giving your previous balance.
So, if you want to verify your balance is correct, you have to go back to your previous statement, get your previous balance, then go your current list of chargers, and add everything on it to your previous balance. But, even if you do that (which I did), it still doesn't add up! Because some of the charges listed might not have been applied yet to your balance (of course, there's no indication of which charges these are), and on top of that, there are small pending merchant fees that have not yet been applied to the charges that have not yet gone through, but have been applied to your balance. It's absolutely absurd.
The woman I talked to about this was actually pretty nice, at first she was in full-on placate-and-get-off-the-phone mode, but after she realized that that wasn't going to work, and that I was actually making sense, she shifted to apologetic, you're-right-I-know-our-system-sucks-but-I'm-not-in-control-of-it mode. I asked her two questions that she just couldn't answer: 1) How would I ever have known which charges were applied toward my current balance if I didn't call you? 2) Even if I did know, why should I, in today's day and age, need a calculator and 30 minutes of free time simply to verify that my balance is correct?
But of course, the answers are really quite simply. We all know why credit card companies do this. They don't want their customers to be able to easily calculate their balances. This way they can tack on bullshit fees and hike up interests rates without getting a rash of complaints. (Both of which have happened to me. And of course it's perfectly legal, because, you know, the GOP says that this type of thing creates jobs, or something like that, and they demonize anybody who speaks out against these types of predatory practice, like, say, Elizabeth Warren.)
The upshot is that I'm going to write a letter to the Capital One corporate offices in Utah, and if I don't get a satisfactory response, I'm going to stop using this card. (Although, I doubt any of the other major banks are much better.) Thankfully, I have the luxury of doing this because I'm not saddled with debt like a lot of people. I've always been pretty smart with credit. Or perhaps I've just always been pretty lazy with credit. It's hard to rack up high credit card bills when you'd rather do just about anything than go out and buy things.
Anyway, on the topic of economics and politics. Playboy did an interview with Paul Krugman, which I recommend everybody read in full. I'll post a few passages that I like, because they sound like things I've been saying. Part of this is because I read Krugman daily, but some of the things, like the stuff about Obama, I was saying to friends in 2007, years before I even really knew who Paul Krugman was. I guess my point is that I should have my own column in the New York Times. I mean, the only difference between me and Paul Krugman is 25 years, two Ivy League degrees in economics, several dozens publications, and a Nobel Prize.
Until next time...
Krugman on Obama:
Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He’s a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom. He’s a certain kind of policy wonk, the kind that looks for things that are sort of centrist in how Washington defines centrist. He was talking about Social Security cuts during the 2008 primary. That’s how you sound serious in our current political culture. He wasn’t sufficiently distanced to step back and say that a lot of our political culture is completely insane.
A lot of people who were normally like me didn’t like me because I was saying, “Obama’s really not the progressive you think he is.” And now they’re all saying, “He’s not the progressive we thought he was.” He came in prepared with the wrong set of instincts, and it’s taken a while to get past that.
Krugman on the lesser depression (his term for our current financial woes):
How about “Let’s get this country moving again”? I’m as prepared as anybody to preach root-canal economics under the right circumstances, but this is not the time for it. The problem with our economy is people would like to buy stuff, but they don’t feel they have the income.
Environmental regulations could actually be creating jobs right now, but people say, “Oh, that’s crazy. How could that be true? Regulations add to costs.” My answer is this: Does the story about the world that underlies what you guys are saying allow for what we see all around us? Do your theories explain nine percent unemployment and this monstrous economic collapse?
Krugman on taxing the rich:
Even some very wealthy people, like Warren Buffett, are more or less saying that. Bill Gates Sr. used to say this: Suppose you were given the choice of being born in America or in Ethiopia. What proportion of your eventual fortune would you be willing to give to be born in America? Given the great good fortune of getting to live and run a business in this country that has all the advantages an advanced country with a decent system provides, how can you think it’s all you? And then, how can you feel you don’t have any obligation to pay it back?
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