Who gets a helium-filled remote-control flying fish for Christmas? Me, that’s who!
I’ll probably have to deflate it for the flight home to Toronto: Air Canada has some retarded policy about these things being stowed during takeoff and landing 🙂 .
Have you ever done something dumb with credit cards before?
I have a cash-back card, and I’m good about keeping it paid down, so I felt pretty happy when the card company would mail me rebate cheques a couple of times a year. I have a handle on consumer credit, go me! On average I was “up” about $200/year.
So, last February when they offered me a 0% loan (with a 1% “service fee” up front) it was almost a no-brainer. I wasn’t going to be making any risky investments if I had to repay in a year… but if I can borrow at 1% and get between 2-2.5% in a regular savings account, why not? After giving Revenue Canada their slice of the action, I should still make about $100. Sign me up!
All I had to do was make sure to keep my card balance paid down to the amount of the loan (since I didn’t want to be paying off my 1% cash early). How hard could that be? (cue dramatic music)
December rolls around and I started to think about moving some money between accounts, to pay off the loan by the end of January. So I took a closer look at my December statement to see where I was… huh?… what do you mean I paid $100 in interest? And $40 in November? And $60 in October? But I pay all my bills on time! It turns out I was too good at paying them off. Occasionally I checked my balance often enough it didn’t show my previous payment yet… so I sometimes repaid twice, and slowly nibbled away some 1% cash each time.
Because I was only looking at the total on my statements, and not checking the “interest paid this month” line… I didn’t realize what was going on. For the first few months of my loan I paid $0 interest… then I started to pay too much … and over the last couple months I had essentially been floating a $3500 balance on my card (1% money that I accidentally paid back, which I was now paying full interest on). Doh!
End result: my brilliant scheme to make $100 has now made me nothing.. in fact I’m $200 in the hole after interest charges. So much for the “cash back” card 🙂
I wasn’t smart enough to keep a steady non-zero card balance for a year, and it cost me. I’m paying the whole thing off _today_. Bah!
(Oh, and Happy Holidays!)
Last night just before 2:30am the fire alarm in our apartment building went off. That actually happens every couple of months or so, and normally building management gets on the intercom fairly quickly to say it’s a false alarm. Not this time. This time we had people running down our hall banging on doors, and other friends in the building calling to see if we “made it out yet”.
So we bundled up, grabbed the dog, and got out of Dodge.
Our 3rd-floor hallway had a haze of smoke, and as soon as we got into the stairwell we were picking our way down stairs covered with water hoses, and scooting around firemen going into the second floor with their masks on. We could see through the glass on the 2nd-floor door that the hall was filled with smoke. Hooray for having a fire station almost at the end of our street… as soon as the alarm goes off they roll… and are normally in the building poking around before half the people have gotten there boots and jackets on.
My sister had to carry her dog Lucy down the stairs… since she wasn’t going anywhere near all the commotion on her leash. So right after we got out and around back of the building to take a peek at the fire… we went for a walk to calm the dog down and since it looked like it was going to take awhile. Just as we left we started to see billows of steam go up the side of the building, as they started to hose things down.
By the time we had walked a couple blocks North and looped back, it was all over, and people were heading back in. Though there were still at least 4 firetrucks and hoses all over the place. This is what we saw this morning.
The fire looks to have started in a garbage area out back, then gutted the second floor apartment immediately above it. Maybe by the end of the day we’ll have heard more news (and hopefully the Rogers guys will be done: they have 3 trucks out back this morning:cable/TV went out at 2:15am as well). A friend at work said she heard somebody tossed a cigarette off their balcony, which may have lit some garbage below.
Update: Found a CityNews link about the fire. Interesting that they say there was damage to the third+fourth floor apartments… and have a picture of the second-floor unit with the balcony/front/window/door destroyed.
Update #2: My friend on the top floor has pictures of the fire here!
“I love you Joey!”
Wait… ahem… what were we talking about again?
Oh yeah: this weekend 3 of my RCs went up on Ebay. One of them I was essentially swapping up for it’s bigger brother… and that new kid arrived in the mail today:
On the left is the new-to-me RC8Te truck (“truggy”), and on the right is the outgoing RC8(Be) buggy. They’re both from Team Associated and based on the same platform (so I can recycle most of my spare parts supply). The truck has a longer chassis, longer suspension arms, and bigger tires… but the drivetrain and required electronics are essentially identical.
Should have it running by the weekend!
This weekend I’m trying to catch up on all my little chores. Winterize the dirtbike, throw out all the extra boxes that have been piling up, and “do something” with my RC toys. I put 2 of them up on Ebay, and started installing parts on another that had been waiting for them for months. A new VW Beetle body and body mounts… a couple cans of paint, and voila!:
The body was dropped until it just covered the chassis when viewing it from the side.
It’s the same truck underneath as before… but now I have a nice body for it that doesn’t have a helmetcam hole sawed into the windshield. 🙂