Tax Credit of $8,000 for First Time Home Buyers

If you are considering buying a new home, you should be aware of this $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers.

Letting Go

I've been carrying the same wallet for about 10 or 15 years that my brother Matthew bought me for Christmas many moons ago. It's gotten so ragged that I have tenants who don't even pay their rent who have offered to buy me a new one. I've put it off for a long time, but tonight I finally broke down and bought a new one.


The little one in the middle came as an added bonus, I guess for when I want to travel light. Here's the open look:


You can't even tell from the pictures how ragged the old one is. But I did get a nice shot of the lint build up:


That 20-10-29 number you see on there? I'm not really sure what that is. Probably the combination to a gym locker at some point...

However, I'm not really sold on this new one. Having those slots for credit cards makes it look like a girl's wallet. And when I put all the cards in it got kind of fat like George Costanza's wallet.


I didn't even put in all the cards I had in the old one -- I had a credit card that I don't use, a Cold Stone gift card with 97 cents on it that I've been carrying around forever, and an old BYU ID.


That white line? Yep, my social security number was printed right on the front. Maybe identity theft didn't exist back in the 90s.

The Limits of Exhaustion

I ended up pulling an "all nighter" accidentally last night. It really was an accident -- I went to bed at a normal time, but because I had slept in till noon on Monday I couldn't go to sleep. The reason I slept so late on Monday was that I had been sick on Sunday, and apparently a combination of a generic Day-quil knock off during the day and Nyquil at night make me sleep for 15+ hours.

So anyway, I got up at noon, I went to bed at midnight, and I couldn't sleep. I got up, did some work for a couple hours, and tried again. Still no good. I didn't want to take more Nyquil and risk sleeping for another 15 hours so I got up and started reading a John Grisham book (that I ended up with because my roommate's girlfriend was going to donate it to charity but it got left on our kitchen table instead... but I digress from my perfectly streamlined story...). And then of course I just kept reading until I finished. (I have a little problem with "moderation" sometimes... good thing I don't drink... or play Word Twist on Facebook...)

I don't remember how many all nighters I pulled in college, I know there were quite a few. But I always got to sleep the next day as soon as I could. This time I started getting phone calls around 8 AM, and I thought, "What the Heck? I'll just see how long I last." So I went to work (meaning I commuted to my home office 20 feet away) and acted like it was a normal day.

About 3 in the afternoon it started really hitting me. By about 4 PM (hour 28) I crashed. I got up at 8 PM (and of course had 6 voice mails...can't you people leave me alone while I'm doing SCIENCE?).

So I guess 28 hours is my reasonable limit. (I could have pushed it further if really necessary but I wouldn't have been at all effective.) Which leads me to wonder about this policy of having doctors work 36 hour shifts in hospitals. How safe can that really be? How many patients have been killed or harmed because the doctor hadn't slept and didn't know what he/she was doing?

I think Barak should look into this... but hopefully he'll worry about more important things first -- instituting PLAYOFFS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL!

Getting Healthy

I don't usually get around to eating all the fruits and vegetables I buy before they go bad. So about a month ago, I started making smoothies to try to use them up. I've been on a smoothie kick ever since. I didn't think it would last very long, because my usual philosophy on food is: "If it takes more than 30 seconds to make, that's too much effort." But for now I'm still going at it.

It's not a good idea to use more than about three ingredients in a smoothie, because then the tastes all merge together and you can't really taste anything specific. But today, just for fun, I thought I'd make the ultimate smoothie, with ALL the ingredients. Here's what I included:

• 3 bananas
  
• 10 strawberries
  
• A handful of blueberries
  
• 1/2 cup of chunk pineapple
  
• An apple
  
• 1/2 cup of orange juice
  
• A few baby carrots
  
• A celery stalk
  
• About 2 inches of cucumber
  
• A handful of spinach
  
• 5 ice cubes
  

It actually tasted pretty good, even though you couldn't really make out individual tastes. The color was, well... you decide:



Around the same time I started making smoothies, I also started making "health pizzas". I use whole wheat crust, lots of vegetables, some pineapple, turkey pepperoni (70% less fat!), and sometimes actual turkey as a topping. But the most visible difference is the spinach, which is kind of a separate layer between the sauce and the toppings. The spinach doesn't have too much taste after cooking, but it adds to the nutritional value. (Even though all the good stuff gets killed when you cook vegetables...yeah yeah.)

(The pizza in the pictures below did not have the whole wheat crust.)

Funny Videos by Barats and Bereta

I recently ran across these guys, another so called Internet meme, i.e. phenomenon. I have to admit I find them much funnier than most of the Internet "sensations". I had seen the Mother's Day video on facebook a while ago without knowing who made it or that they had other videos. Then I saw a link to another one recently and realized that I could waste over an hour of my life watching these short videos. WARNING: Some of them are a little on the PG-13 side. View at your own risk.

If you only want to waste 10 or 15 minutes of your life, these are the main ones that I thought were funny:

1. MANtage CLASSIC!
   
2. harty boys
   
3. The Sexy Milk Jump This one is definitely PG-13 rated, but the end kills me. If you don't know about the Numa guy, you can do your homework here. Or you can view the original Numa video. And yes, apparently that is the real Numa guy in their video.
   
4. completely uncalled for
   
5. mother's day
   
6. Douche Off
   
7. so smooth
   
8. double dragon
   

Kid shot after robbing my rental house

I got a call on Wednesday from a tenant who lives in a rental house that I own in Glendale. She had come home from work early to find a burglar in the house! The burglar had broken in by breaking a bedroom window. She said she tried the door but it wouldn't open. When she called I thought she was talking about the front door but thinking about it later, she might have been referring to the door to the bedroom where he had broken in, because he apparently left out the window and fled.

So she called 911, and the cops came. She said they were there within 1 minute! They searched the area and found the burglar! Or at least they found someone suspicious. The suspect pulled a weapon on the officers, and they opened fire. The poor kid died in the hospital from the gunshot wounds.

When I got the call, the news was already on the front page of azcentral, with a video interview of one of the officers. After seeing the news reports I was a little concerned that they weren't revealing what kind of "weapon" the kid had pulled on the officers. Did he just pull out a wrench and get shot for it? Then today an article came out claiming that he had had a semi-automatic handgun. Hopefully they aren't just making that up as an excuse for the shooting.

The articles also made it sound like the tenant "confronted" the burglar, so I'm not really sure what went down in the house. The only thing that's clear is that he broke in through a window and eventually ran away after she came home.

Fun times in landlording! Think twice before you buy a rental in the hood. Actually this house isn't even in the hood, but it kind of borders it.

The window cost me $200, plus I'm going to be installing an alarm system in the house. Not too rough of a deal for me. I just feel bad for the tenant and worse for the kid.