What to do when work is not possible?

Somebody forgot to put their wireless mouse in the charging cradle last night. So it's time for part 2 of the Nermal story!

In the fall of 2007 (wait, I'll say autumn, fall is too foreshadowy) we moved to Mississauga. Nermal spent a few weeks with my mother-in-law again while we carted things back and forth to our new home, and eventually Nermal came on one of the last trips. She delighted in having parquet and ceramic floors to tear around on, two flights of stairs for getting into trouble, a leather couch she wouldn't touch and a treadmill that was the best scratching post ever. She even had a basement rife with nooks for hiding out in. She never took much interest in clawing our leather sectional sofa, which I attribute to dumb luck more than anything. Instead she picked on my grandmother's antique china cabinet, my ex's treadmill, and the walls themselves.

For much the same reasons as why she lost her job in London, my ex and I began to have relationship problems, escalating to the point that we split in June. Nermal's fate was in limbo, and since it was a familiar place she went to live with my (now ex-)mother-in-law for the summer. My ex inexplicably (to me) decided she wanted nothing to do with Nermal, and from very early on it was decided that Nermal would live with me permanently, as soon as I had a place to live. I lived with a relative of a cousin, in a basement room in uptown Toronto, for most of the summer. She had three cats already, some with health problems, and it was best for Nermal not to come live there.

By August, that living arrangement started to get, well, old. There was nothing wrong with it, and I appreciated the generosity very much, but I was feeling like I should have my own space, and of course wanted to have Nermal back. In early August I learned that Alex, a student co-worker of mine, was also looking for a place, as his summer living arrangement was coming to the end of its availability at the end of the summer. I suggested that we should pool our resources and look for a place together, which I think ended up being beneficial to both of us. Although I will admit that Alex did most of the work finding a place, and it was no small task considering we started on the second week of August to find a place for September 1st. We lucked out big-time and found a big two-bedroom sub-let, connected to a subway junction, that came in just inside our budget.

Nermal joined us in mid-September, after a transfer in London made unnecessarily awkward by my ex's unplanned attendance, and a typically uneventful drive back to Toronto, which to date has been Nermal's last inter-city road trip. She took to the new surroundings cautiously at first, pacing the perimeter of the apartment (no doubt looking for an escape) and then settling on the huge 11th story window as the best place ever. She took a while to be ok with Alex (and likewise) but they eventually became buds. Alex would walk through the front door and yell "WHAT'S UP CAT?" and Nermal would run out from whatever mischief she was getting into and tangle herself up in the mat in the front hall. She even decided after a few months that it was ok to attack Al's feet instead of mine when it was 5am food time, and may have slept on his face once, if the early morning fit of swearing and fur flying was any indication.

We did have one incident where a friend of ours was over, and we were all a little sloshed and laughing and carrying on and being loud. Alex has a particularly boisterous laugh, and Nermal responded to one particular fit by launching out from under a table and giving Alex the five-claw handshake, so to speak, then ran off under another table. He survived, but that was the end of that laughing fit.

In the next part: I meet Tay, Alex gets deported, and Nermal's single-cat existence comes to an end ....

Nine lives

I occasionally have weird thoughts. Like, not serial killer weird, just unusual. A couple days ago Tay was out at a gig, and I was home alone with our three cats. We've only officially been living together for just under two weeks, so the concept of joint possession hasn't quite established yet, so I still feel like Nermal is my cat, and Tay's two cats are hers. I know that's not really the case for a variety of reasons and at any rate the cats are already over it, but moving on ....

I got to thinking, as I watched Nermal curled up under the bathmat attacking a crumpled Shoppers receipt, that she has likely had an abnormally interesting life, for a cat. She's on at least her seventh home in three years, and although I've been a fairly constant figure in that time, she and I have had a multitude of environments, partners and roommates over that time.

My ex and I decided to get a cat back in the spring of 2006, mostly a result of our varying degrees of aversion to children, also I had never not lived with multiple cats up to about a year before that. We went to Animal Control in London, and a possibly one-year-old cat slashed my ex in the face without provocation, and then poured on the cute. She came home with us about a week later. What her life was like before that time I have no idea. She was young but not a kitten, and had been picked up as a stray. Animal Control requires pets to be fixed, and rather than pay a deposit and have the operation done ourselves, the staff there put her in with a batch of cats that were going to their contract vet later in the week. We had temporarily named her after a coworker my ex was having issues with, and that got corrupted to Josie somehow. That almost stuck, because I'm a huge geek. But she was cute, so she ended up getting named after Garfield's cute sidekick. Also because I'm a huge geek.

Point of interest: in the Jim Davis comic, Nermal is in fact male. But still cute.

Nermal came to live with us on the third floor of our high-rise, and had a peaceful life of chasing string, clawing up carpet and watching the thousands of starlings that would land in the trees outside every night. When my ex had her work friends over for their Grey's Anatomy parties, she hid out with me in the bedroom. When we went away to Cuba, she lived with my ex's parents for a week, happily chasing chipmunks through the sliding patio door of their townhouse.

The conflict between my ex and her coworker continued to escalate, and in the summer of 2007 she lost her job as a direct result. We ended up making a sudden, unexpected and poorly planned move to Mississauga in the fall, ironically on our last anniversary. Nermal lived in her second home at my ex's parents townhouse for a few weeks while we got settled.

In a later post: Nermal comes to Mississauga, but not for long ....

Ein buch für alle und keinen

Is it just me, or is the "smart guy" in the Rogers wireless commercials a total douchebag?

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Rogers Wireless has these commercials on TV around here which start off with a guy talking business with someone on a cell phone. He's made out to be an overworked subordinate type, and always seems to be scheduling a meeting with a supervisor, when he ends up in an unfortunate situation, either going into a tunnel or down an escalator, or in the latest one running out of a boardroom, always scrambling to avoid losing his signal but ultimately getting disconnected. I feel sorry for this guy. He seems to be working his ass off all the time and getting no respect, and I imagine he's seriously underpaid and working for a company with no perks, otherwise he could afford a haircut and a nice suit, not to mention a better cell plan.

Of course, every time this poor sap gets disconnected, out of nowhere comes Rogers Guy, around a corner or out of the tunnel, basically going through whatever calamity caused the first guy's phone to disconnect, except he's happily chatting away with someone on his Rogers phone which has kept its connection, depsite the tunnel or bridge or whatever. Rogers Guy is this guy in a nice suit, with a perfect haircut and beaming smile, and despite his obvious status he always seems to be having an inane one-word conversation "yep, yeah, uh-huh" with whoever is on the other line. He notices the other guy having been just disconnected, and says "hey" or something else ultimately unhelpful. In the latest commercial he doesn't let the other guy in from the rain after he runs out a locked-from-the-inside door to try to keep on his call.

To add to the effect (or the insult) every time Rogers Guy makes his appearance, the epic introduction to Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra starts playing. Ahh, marketing.

Finance tip: put 10% of your pay into a savings account

Yeah, two posts in one day. w00t

I've been hearing this little tidbit of advice, or something like it, for years. It's a great little piece of advice for the not-finance-savvy mass public. A typical high-interest savings account is a great, risk-free way to see your money grow over time, and the results of putting in a little bit regularly will really add up.

But this comes with a major caveat that most people don't hear: PAY YOUR DEBTS OFF FIRST!!

A typical high-interest savings account might pay something like 2% - 4% per year. Guaranteed term investments (GIC's) and other products might pay a percent or so better because of your term commitment. Then again, your typical credit card charges an interest rate of about 18% per year, and many retail cards charge close to 30%! Pay these off FIRST. Entirely. BEFORE you open a savings account.

Here is a simplified example. Say you have a credit card with a balance of $2000, and an interest rate of 18%. Starting in January, you have $200 free income to invest every month. You decide to pay the minimums on the credit card (3% typical) and deposit what's left in a savings account paying 4% interest. In one year, you've managed to pay down the credit card to $1,642.86, and have $1,768.32 in savings, earning $31.79 in interest for the year. Not bad, right? Until you factor in the $331.74 in interest you racked up on the credit card balance. You've lost $299.95 overall on your $2,400 investment, a net return of -12.5%.

Here's another example. Same as before, but this time you put the entire $200 into repaying the credit card. By November, the balance on the credit card is paid off completely, and you start depositing the remainder into savings. At the end of the year, you only have $220.19 in savings, but the credit card balance of zero gives you a net loss for the year of $180.47 (-7.5%).

It doesn't seem like much of a difference, and all that cash in savings looks good, right? Extended into a second year, scenario 1 returns a loss of 7.1% in year 2, whereas scenario 2 gives you a gain of 2.2%! And you'll still be paying off your credit card and losing more money under the first method.

What you have to realize is that a payment to your 18% credit card is very much like an investment in a savings account that pays 18% interest, which is much higher than any real savings account will ever be. The only difference is that instead of earning the interest, you are instead offsetting interest that you would pay otherwise.

Side note: if you continued to pay the minimum on that credit card, you would pay off the balance in October of the fourteenth year. You would have paid $1,798.88 in interest over that length of time.

Another side note: paid-off credit cards look great on a credit report, so don't close them once you've paid them off! Just cut them up so you don't rack up a huge balance again!

Her smile makes it all better

Tay suggested some time over the last month that I should probably not have posts on here about work. And she's probably right. So I won't post anything here about work. Well, maybe the occasional humorous anecdote, like that time I got my head stuck in the filing cabinet. But no more schemes for world domination.

Today finds me transcoding videos for the trailer trash party, anticipating picking up the keys to our new apartment in the Beaches, and finally starting to work out equalization settlement details with my ex. Fun times in Gregland. Or the Vectorium. Still haven't told my parents that Tay and I are moving in together, not for fear of reprisal, just because I haven't been home to use my phone to call my mom in a few straight days. And my cell got cut off and Fido refuses to send me the bill. Genius.

A lot of talk at lunch today about Twitter, so I might just hop on. Would give me one more unproductive thing to do at the office, really. One can only play so much nethack ....

Goodbye Ivanvector the Ranger...
You died in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 5 with 3516 points,
and 318 pieces of gold, after 3206 moves.
Killer: magic missile
You were level 7 with a maximum of 45 hit points when you died.