Last year, we did not get very many trick or treaters. We didn’t this year, either.

In an effort to give away candy, and because this thought had occurred to me two or three months ago and I really wanted to do it, I decided to create a ghost in the front yard. I managed to get it up before my wife got home, so her and a few teenagers walking by got a good laugh out of it.

To see how I did it, read the rest of this article: Read the rest of this entry »

From the moment my husband and I first visited the home that we bought a little over a year ago, we knew we’d need to change the colors of the walls inside our house. The hallway, living room and master bedroom were a mint green color that appears to have been original décor from the house’s early 1970s origin. The dining room and bathroom were a beige color that reminded me too much of the long line of rental apartments I’d lived in over the years. The kitchen may have been the worst. The walls were a shade of white (who knew white had so many shades?) and there was a floral wallpaper border around the top and at chair rail height. The second bedroom was the only room in the house with a nice color- a pretty, pale blue.

I actually picked up some paint chips before we had even closed on the house. But a year later, the walls were still untouched. Finally, we decided to start picking out some colors. We had seen an article in Consumer Reports that ranked Behr paints high in several categories, so we headed to Home Depot to look at paint chips. I’ve read numerous books, magazines and web site articles and watched countless television shows about decorating, almost all of them including some sort of color choice. In fact, there is a show on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) called Get Color that is completely devoted to color choices in the home.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been over a year since we bought the house, and thoughts of refinancing have been swimming through my head. I started shopping around to see if it made sense to refinance after Nickel was trying to decide when to refinance a mortgage. He had an opportunity to pay some closing costs and get a low interest rate, or take a slightly higher interest rate and avoid the closing costs of the refinance. He had not quite decided what to do and had more thoughts about refinancing which further developed the idea.

I don’t think that refinancing is quite going to work in our favor yet. We are well ahead of where we should be on paying down our loan, but I don’t think that we have paid it down quite enough yet. I think that once we have paid another $6000 towards the principle it will be worth trying to reexamine our refinancing options, since we still have a little less than 20% equity. We had gotten a split loan with the bulk of the loan at 6.25%, which we have been paying down on the 30 year fixed schedule. A small piece of the loan covered about 4% of the total loan price and came with a heavier price tag over 7%. We have paid down about a third of that loan already.

Getting back to Five Cent Nickel’s site, though, I recommend that you head over for a visit. I have been following three of his websites for most of the last two years, and he is having a two year anniversary celebration and giving away some prizes. You should at least leave a comment there and see if you can’t lessen my chances of winning an envelope full of bricks! He’s also giving away iPods and fun things of that nature.

When we bought our house, our buyer’s agent gave us a number of house warming gifts from his company. One of them was a 75 gallon coupon to the local oil company, provided that you signed on with their automatic delivery program for a minimum of one year. When it came time to prepay for our oil, I discovered that I had misplaced the coupon. A few months go by, and I have no luck finding the coupon and we are beginning to get low on what oil is left. I bit the bullet and called to purchase a few thousand dollars of oil without the benefit of getting 75 gallons of it for free. It turned out however that the window of opportunity for purchasing your oil in advance had passed and we could only get onto a pay as you go plan.

It turns out that losing that coupon saved us a lot of money, because the price of oil was much lower all winter than if we had prepaid. Not only that, but they assured us that if we found the coupon at a later date we could still use it as long as we were using the automatic delivery program. Fast forward to a month ago, and I found the coupon.

I went to oil company in person to redeem the coupon for 75 of the 125 gallons that had been delivered, and then paid the cash price difference for what was left. Our oil company charges a different price for the oil if you pay them on time. I was then a little surprised when a bill arrived for the difference between the cash price we paid plus the free 75 gallons and the full price for the oil. I called them up, we sorted it on the phone, and they took the charge off of our bill as we had not only paid on time, but when I received the bill it was still within 30 days of delivery.

I thought that that would be the end of it, until we got another statement last week. Our balance due was $0, but it showed that we actually had a credit for about the amount that they had over charged us. When I looked over the transaction history, I saw that they had credited us for that one penny less, and then corrected their error by crediting us for the full amount that they were supposed to. They never removed the original charge, though, so it turned into a discount that was about twice as large as it was supposed to be.

Of course, I called them back to inform them of the error. While getting an extra 10 gallons of so of oil for free on our next delivery would have been nice, we didn’t actually deserve it. Had they given me any problems when I tried letting them know about the “problem” then I would not have wasted any more time and would have just accepted the gift. However, they were very thankful that I called them and have supposedly zeroed out our balance so that everything is as it should be.

I just hope that they didn’t make another mistake and that they don’t now show us as owing them money again; not until they make another delivery at least.

Over the past few weeks, we determined that we were going to get Behr paint from Home Depot. The idea is that we will paint most of the interior walls the week after my wife finishes her finals and before she starts working this summer, so that we can get rid of the awful mint green that permates the majority of the house. Consumer Reports had nice thing to say about the paint, and we found some paint chips that had the colors we were looking for and hung them on the wall.

Being as busy as we were, we had only managed to narrow down the selections but had not made any actual choices on paint yet when I went to Home Depot yesterday morning. I had a few tools I needed to get, and figured that I might as well wait until I could get a free light bulb. I happened to notice that Behr was running a promotion for a 25% rebate on paint. I came home, we chose our colors, we measured our walls, and we were out the door to get our paint. We were going to buy it in a week anyway, so this way we can get some of the money back in a few months.

Measuring how much paint we needed was a fun experience. What we did was basically measure each surface that was going to be painted for each color. We had one column that had the height and width that would be painted, and another column for the height and width of anything that would not be painted such as doors and windows. I then threw all of those numbers into a spreadsheet, had it figure out the square footage, and add and subtract all of the numbers for us.

The paint requirements for the house spreadsheet is pretty simple, and could easily be made more useful. However, this was a one-off thing so I just went quick and dirty. The amount of paint needed was off a little bit, because I assumed that one gallon of paint could cover 350 square feet of wall space. According to the guy at Home Depot, the stuff that we bought covers about 400 square feet per gallon.

If you are interested in downloading the spreadsheet, take a look and let me know if you find it useful. We wound up buying 5 gallons and 1 quart of paint, and 3 gallons of primer. Our kitchen will be yellow and orange, and the yellow will carry through the hallways and the living room. Two of the walls in the living room will be a darker yellow. Our bedroom will be a different green than is in there now. The dining room is going to be red.

I ran the Boston Marathon on Monday, and was happy that the weather was not all doom and gloom as had been forecasted for the past couple of weeks. The doom and gloom managed to blow over the day before the race, and started clearing up in the hours before the gun went off. I called my wife an hour or two after I finished the race (I wanted to make sure she was out of class) and discovered that her classes had been cancelled and that the power had been off and on all night and all day.

When my friend dropped me off at the train station, I discovered that the tracks had been washed out and that the trains were cancelled. Thankfully, he wasn’t too far away and had his phone on him so I was able to get a ride to the bus station.

The highway was flooded in a few places, and there was no power in the Portland area. Driving through Portland is very eery when there are no stop lights, no street lights, no house lights, and temporary stop signs everywhere. One of the only places that had power was the local peeler bar (which seemed pretty busy for a Monday night) and the blocks around it.

I also had to try taking four or five different routes to get home, because the roads were all blocked off. I’d get going one way, and have to turn around and try another. When I got home, I discovered that my picnic table had been blown off of my deck and into a tree. I suppose that that is better than into the brook on the other side of the tree.

Things had not significantly improved yesterday. Roads were still closed, power lines were still lying in the street, and the area was still flooded. Things are starting to slowly get back to normal, though.

Update: A coworker sent me a link to some pictures from work before the office got closed for the rest of the day. They weren’t uploaded with a creative commons license, so I can’t post the pictures themselves here. Some of the more interesting ones include the wind blowing some trees over, the flood in the driveway (there is a four foot ditch right next to the driveway, so that is a lot of water!), and some tree trunks that broke next to some trees that were torn right out of the ground.

The last time that I stopped in at Freihofer’s bakery outlet, I did not have the best experience. However, every other time that I am there I have had an average experience, and they have great prices on english muffins and bagels that I eat on a daily basis. Today, I had an experience there that more than makes up for the last time I went in.

Today when I went to the store, they had both english muffins and bagels on sale. When you can get both at or just over a dollar for a half dozen, it pays to stock up. When I got to the counter, I was chatting with the manager about the good price. I said something along the lines of how the last time I was in they were both on sale as well, which hadn’t happened before. Then I mentioned how I should have gotten my last batch for free, but I didn’t because the lady ringing me out had not been paying attention.

The store has a promotion where if a red dot appears on your receipt, whatever you are buying is free. She did not notice until after she had punched in my cash, so when I pointed it out her response was something along the lines of, “Well, I already punched in your cash, so the next person in line gets their food for free.”

When I spoke with the manager today, I was certainly complaining, but I did it in a joking way and not in any way trying to get free food out of him. He just said, “Tell you what, you can have the rest of this for free.” He had only rung up a couple of packs of bagels, so I thanked him and said that he didn’t have to do that and handed him my credit card. Of course, the amount was below what they accept credit for. I took a 5 dollar bill out, but he just decided to cancel the order and gave me all four bags of bagels and 3 packages of english muffins for free. His reasoning was that I was a good customer and he knew that I’d be back, so he did not lose much by giving them to me. Of course, I’d have been back even had I paid for all of them, and I offered to do so.

This rambling story just goes to show that some stores are willing to make good on their mistakes, even when you don’t require them to. I like that.

For those that haven’t heard, there has been a massive recall on wet cat and dog food.

Symptoms range from the animal throwing up excessively to your pet dropping dead. Menu Foods, which manufactures about 80% of the pet food in the country, switched to a new supplier for gluten which they theorize may have been the reason for the food to be tainted. They have since gotten a new supplier and recalled everything that could be dangerous.

I called my local pet food store to make sure that my cat was safe (or not), and since we usually buy about 3 months worth of food at a time and are getting low we are safe.

According to the woman at the store, there haven’t been any cases involving Nutro foods yet (which is what my cat eats) but it was recalled as well as it comes from the same source that was tainted.

The effected food will be dated for December ‘08 through March ‘09, so if you have something that says it is best by before then, you should be all set. My cat’s food is all dated July of ‘08.

If you have any of the effected foods, call the store where you bought it so that they can verify whether what you bought has been recalled.

Recalled cat foods
Americas Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Best Choice; Companion; Compliments; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat, Shep Dog; Food Lion; Foodtown; Giant Companion; Good n Meaty; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Li’l Red; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Nutriplan; Nutro Max Gourmet Classics; Nutro Natural Choice; Paws; Presidents Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Sophistacat; Special Kitty; Springfield Pride; Sprout; Total Pet; My True Friend; Wegmans; Western Family; White Rose; and Winn Dixie.

Recalled dog foods
America’s Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Award; Best Choice; Big Bet; Big Red; Bloom; Bruiser; Cadillac; Companion; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat; Shep Dog; Food Lion; Giant Companion; Great Choice; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Mixables; Nutriplan; Nutro Max; Nutro Natural Choice; Nutro; Ol’Roy; Paws; Pet Essentials; Pet Pride; President’s Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Publix; Roche Bros; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Springsfield Pride; Sprout; Stater Bros; Total Pet; My True Friend; Western Family; White Rose; Winn Dixie and Your Pet.

Coming just in time to spoil our plans to leave the state for the weekend, Winter wanted to show everybody that while Spring weather has begun to peek through every few days, it is not quite here yet. I am not sure exactly how much snow we got, since I was out shoveling 6 or 7 times and the wind left drifts everywhere. It was an interesting mix, though. Light powder, that then melted and became slush before freezing into ice, covered with more powder which then began to melt into slush. There was a great layering effect that happened.

I am very glad that we tried finding some snow shovels on clearance in the past few weeks. Our old plastic snow shovels were all torn up at the ends; one of them had lost about an inch and a half all told and the other was all curled and splitting. Our new shovels have a nice metal brace at the end of the shovel to help get the ice up and to keep the plastic from breaking. I also bought an ice pick for the driveway that has already shown us more value than the buck and a half it cost us.

All told, I think that I spent about 6 or 7 hours out shoveling. Thankfully, our neighbor has a snow blower and he did about a quarter of my driveway for me, which saved me about an hour and a half of work. The plows were able to clean up the streets and what was left melted off nicely, which meant that I got a couple of quality runs in this weekend without having to worry about footing.

Having a metal roof is nice, because the snow doesn’t have to be brushed off of your roof.

This is the first time that I have actually been home when it came down, though. It starts out sounding a little like thunder, but then it doesn’t stop for a good 20 or 30 seconds and begins getting much louder. That, and it makes your entire house shake.

I am just glad that I put the plywood over all of the shrubs that are right in the line of fire.

Thankfully, the patio chair in our back yard was already buried under 4 feet of snow, so I doubt that the pressure of all that falling snow will damage it much in its nice little insulated shell. The bowl in our back yard collects all of the drift from the yard and what comes over the water, despite being 4 or 5 feet above the water. I am sure that no small amount of that is what slides off of the roof as well. I don’t plan on using my back door too much right now.