CONUNDRUMS ABOUND!
Twenty minutes ago I had no idea that an artist I knew about via an excellent side project (L.E.O. and the amazing "Alpacas Orgling" album) had a third solo album that came out late the summer. "Late This Summer" is just within the bounds of being recent enough that I can review it and recoup the expense of purchasing it.
Loading up Amazon I find that I can download the album for $9.49 and have it instantly. Or I can get a used copy of the actual CD, shipped, in a week or so for just under eight bucks.
Pay more money, don't get a physical CD with artwork and liner notes BUT have it instantly and the artist actually gets paid for his work
-OR-
Pay less money, get more (physical CD) but I have to wait and the guy who created all the (hopefully) musical goodness gets nothing from the deal.
Hmmmm....
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Refinancing Conundrum
We're in the process of having our house refinanced. Doing so would lower our payments about $100 a month and the Magic 8 ball said it would be a good move.
Right now we're in the midst of the appraisal stage. As everyone and their hermit knows home values have dropped since we bought the house nearly five years ago. However we got a very good deal and paid 20% down (to avoid that pesky PMI) and we've been paying a bit extra each month on the principle and home values in our area have been fairly stable so I wasn't concerned.
I should have been.
The appraiser, who spent an unusually long amount of time jockeying her SUV around to get into our driveway, valued the house at $10,000 less than we paid for it. Because there hasn't been much sales activity in our neighborhood in the last she for comparision she used a house two blocks away and two houses FOUR MILES AWAY. HUH? It's not like we live in the country... we're in the city so four miles could be just about anywhere. In this case it was near Rudisill. I mean no disrespect to those living in the Rudisill area and there are many fine, well built, older houses like ours but it's well known that the area is a bit on the urban side. Home values traditionally are quite a bit lower in that part of town so naturally our value got dinged. Seems a bit of common sense would prevail, eh? So its time to file a review / complaint / whatever to see if this can be changed. I've been told not to expect much.
Which would mean having to pay a nice chunk of change at closing NEXT WEEK in order to avoid those nasty PMI fees. We don't have to pay a mortgage payment in January so the amount we need is quite close to our monthly mortgage payment. If closing was in three weeks it'd be no sweat, just take Mortgage Payment A and apply it to Mortgage Prepayment B and everyone is happy. So now I'm looking for a rich uncle to lend me a thousand bucks for two weeks.
The good news is that I can take this OFFICIAL APPRAISAL to the county tax officials and have our taxes adjusted. They only have it inflated by $50,000 or so meaning that in addition to saving money on the mortgage we should also start paying less in property taxes.
What to do with all this money we'll be saving? How about maternity and baby clothes! OH YEAH!
Right now we're in the midst of the appraisal stage. As everyone and their hermit knows home values have dropped since we bought the house nearly five years ago. However we got a very good deal and paid 20% down (to avoid that pesky PMI) and we've been paying a bit extra each month on the principle and home values in our area have been fairly stable so I wasn't concerned.
I should have been.
The appraiser, who spent an unusually long amount of time jockeying her SUV around to get into our driveway, valued the house at $10,000 less than we paid for it. Because there hasn't been much sales activity in our neighborhood in the last she for comparision she used a house two blocks away and two houses FOUR MILES AWAY. HUH? It's not like we live in the country... we're in the city so four miles could be just about anywhere. In this case it was near Rudisill. I mean no disrespect to those living in the Rudisill area and there are many fine, well built, older houses like ours but it's well known that the area is a bit on the urban side. Home values traditionally are quite a bit lower in that part of town so naturally our value got dinged. Seems a bit of common sense would prevail, eh? So its time to file a review / complaint / whatever to see if this can be changed. I've been told not to expect much.
Which would mean having to pay a nice chunk of change at closing NEXT WEEK in order to avoid those nasty PMI fees. We don't have to pay a mortgage payment in January so the amount we need is quite close to our monthly mortgage payment. If closing was in three weeks it'd be no sweat, just take Mortgage Payment A and apply it to Mortgage Prepayment B and everyone is happy. So now I'm looking for a rich uncle to lend me a thousand bucks for two weeks.
The good news is that I can take this OFFICIAL APPRAISAL to the county tax officials and have our taxes adjusted. They only have it inflated by $50,000 or so meaning that in addition to saving money on the mortgage we should also start paying less in property taxes.
What to do with all this money we'll be saving? How about maternity and baby clothes! OH YEAH!
Monday, December 7, 2009
Fuzzy Kitten Warning
The latest head honco at work (who is in charge of daily operations and yet lives many states away and visits this humble city a handful of days per month) decided that our offices are ugly and that we need artwork on the walls. No big surprise there. We received a budget of $3,000 and a couple of employees were approached about using their photographs. These guys are semi-pro photographers and have very nice cameras that take very nice pictures. Plus there's the matter of having the artful eye in creating a pleasing composition for these very nice pictures. The company is going to pay to have the prints professionally framed but when the employees asked how much they would get paid for the use of their photographs, well, shouldn't that all be gratis?
So now we're having a company-wide photo contest! Go out and take pictures of the city (or children and/or kittens... children and/or kittens always score big in photo contests... pretty much anything that looks like it belongs on a 99 cent Walgreen calendar) and submit them. Many will enter, many will win and you'll get to see your artwork all big and blown up in 16X20s on the walls.
Of course these will probably be shot at 8 or 10 megapixels with compact pocket cameras so once they get blown up to poster size there will be noticable grain. Oh, and it's currently winter so every exterior picture will be washed out, colorless and grey unless they are taken during the 18.2 minutes of sunshine during the average north-eastern Indiana January.
I personally think we should also have a picture framing and matte cutting contest. Cut that matte nice and square and you'll get the satisfaction of seeing your matte surrounding an off-center fuzzy photograph of a co-workers childing holding a fuzzy kitten!
So now we're having a company-wide photo contest! Go out and take pictures of the city (or children and/or kittens... children and/or kittens always score big in photo contests... pretty much anything that looks like it belongs on a 99 cent Walgreen calendar) and submit them. Many will enter, many will win and you'll get to see your artwork all big and blown up in 16X20s on the walls.
Of course these will probably be shot at 8 or 10 megapixels with compact pocket cameras so once they get blown up to poster size there will be noticable grain. Oh, and it's currently winter so every exterior picture will be washed out, colorless and grey unless they are taken during the 18.2 minutes of sunshine during the average north-eastern Indiana January.
I personally think we should also have a picture framing and matte cutting contest. Cut that matte nice and square and you'll get the satisfaction of seeing your matte surrounding an off-center fuzzy photograph of a co-workers childing holding a fuzzy kitten!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Halloween Horrors
I recently stumbled across an amazing web site dedicated to halloween music... including downloads! So I downloaded about one hundred hours of music and started digging in! There's tons of monster movie soundtracks from the Universal days up through the mid-70s plus lots of unique finds.
One nice treasure, for me in particular, is a record my family had called "Halloween Horrors." The first side is a spooky story about an old southern mansion, complete with tons of sound effects. While the adult me finds it amusing the kid me, as well as my brothers, found it pretty creepy stuff! Side two of this album is fifty or so sound effects that you can use to make your own scary tale, including every sound used on the first side. I don't recall that we ever made a scary tale but perhaps we tried and it was such a let down that I've erased it from my memory. It was a blast hearing these again after so many years, remembering things like how we laughed at the kitten sound effect. Ooooo.... scary kitten!
Of note is a snippet of violin music that was strategically used on side one. Years later I finally found out that this was from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a piece that isn't particularly frightening unless Romantic composers creep you out.
The web site? Right here at Universalhorrorsounds.blogspot.com. The links to download the files are in the comments section.
Enjoy!
Friday, October 9, 2009
The following is a true story:
Last night I stopped by Pios, a local old timey meat market to pick up something to make for dinner. While I make my way to the counter I overhead a lady ask "Do you want steak tonight?" I look over and she's asking what appears to be a ten year old girl. "Must be nice," I thought. When I was a kid we rarely got steak and even now steak is a luxury. But I'm all for those who work hard and don't begrudge anyone what they've rightly earned.
Except this lady and her daughter and her twelvish looking son in their baggy clothes and greasy hair didn't exactly look like go-getters.
As it is a small store they have plastic baskets to put your food in instead of the giant Walmart-type carts. "Carry that basket up the front so mamma can pay."
"I can't. It's too heavy!"
By this time I'm by the counter and can see a basket overflowing with bundles wrapped in white butcher paper, capped off with a side of ribs. Again, I loves me some good ribs but it's not something I can afford, opting instead of the more affordable pulled pork.
Somehow the basket gets to the front of the store while Neil gets my order together (two and a half pounds of hamburger which I will stretch to feed a family of seven, if you must know) and I overhear the lady approve of the candy her kids have picked out. I take my solitary purchase and walk to the front of the store in time to see this lady pay for her feast of meat with a food stamp card.
I sure was glad that I could help pay for her $84 of meat. This wasn't the first time I'd been standing in line behind someone buying $50 of meat using food stamps while I pay cash for a pound or two of hamburger, sometimes seeing these same people drive away in nice new cars out in the parking lot while I climb into my 1995 Ford Taurus.
What's wrong with this picture?
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Generic October Entry
I haven't been writing much here because I've been writing elsewhere. Or rather I've started submitting my short stories for publications. So far I have a stable of five stories (six if you count that I changed one slightly to "Christianize" it for a particular magazine) and and have received five or six rejection notices. YEAH! I'm not taking it personally, though, 'cause volume is the name of the game. Sure, after 100 rejections and not one bite I might feel the sting but for now it's onward ho!
The plan is to write one short story or make two submissions per week. I found an amazing site that lets you plug in the type of publication and it will give you a massive list of on-line and print magazines, how much or if they pay, their criteria, etc. For the most part it seems that my genre is "slipstream", which not surprisingly is a fancy word for "weird and offbeat." Go with your strengths, I suppose.
I also completed the Fruit Bat song... nine months in the making from melodic and lyric-snippet conception in January, hastily sung into a digital recorder to be revived a few months later when I had time to flesh it out. The amazing Greg Flesh, guitarist for Daniel Amos and The Swirling Eddies, laser scientist for NASA and potential Lutheran pastor, was generous enough to add lead guitar tracks all the way from California. Now it's time to work on a song for a Gene Eugene tribute album ("Hide Away") and two cover songs for Melynda for Christmas.
The plan is to write one short story or make two submissions per week. I found an amazing site that lets you plug in the type of publication and it will give you a massive list of on-line and print magazines, how much or if they pay, their criteria, etc. For the most part it seems that my genre is "slipstream", which not surprisingly is a fancy word for "weird and offbeat." Go with your strengths, I suppose.
I also completed the Fruit Bat song... nine months in the making from melodic and lyric-snippet conception in January, hastily sung into a digital recorder to be revived a few months later when I had time to flesh it out. The amazing Greg Flesh, guitarist for Daniel Amos and The Swirling Eddies, laser scientist for NASA and potential Lutheran pastor, was generous enough to add lead guitar tracks all the way from California. Now it's time to work on a song for a Gene Eugene tribute album ("Hide Away") and two cover songs for Melynda for Christmas.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Backlogged
Not much to talk about lately. Well, not much chance at least. I still need to regale my 1.72 readers with the exciting garden battle stories complete with pictures (spoiler: the humans won but not without casualties).
Right now, though, I'm busy with catching up on my music. It's a tough life. At this very moment I have 100+ albums that I've yet to listen to or listen to enough to know if I like it or not (tagged with an "In Process" label in my database). I'm a junkie. Plus there's my wife's collection that she brought into the marriage that I chip away at now and then. Many of these are probably ready to be rated and moved off the "In Process" list but they're so good and I feel that I haven't plumbed their depths completely and I know that if they move off the "In Process" list that they probably won't get the attention they deserve. SOMEONE GET ME AN INTERVENTION!!!
So for no other reason other than I'm a dweeb, here are the albums currently being pumped through my brain:
Phil Solem's (of The Rembrandts) unnamed unreleased solo album (it's quite good!)
Thrush unreleased songs
Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record (how did I manage to evade ELO for all these decades?)
Keane - Under the Iron Sea
Sam Phillips - The Turning
Mark Heard - Stop the Dominoes
scaterd-few - Sin Disease
Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left
George Harrison - Thirty Three & 1/3
Gentle Giant - Octopus
Peter Case - The Man With the Blue Post Modern Fragmented Neo-... Guitar
Aimee Mann - Lost in Space
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Hoodwinked Soundtrack
Recess Monkey - Field Trip
fun. - Aim & Ignite
Kevin Moore - Ghost Book
Neal Morse - Sola Scriptura
Of course I've paid the record companies for each of these.
Right now, though, I'm busy with catching up on my music. It's a tough life. At this very moment I have 100+ albums that I've yet to listen to or listen to enough to know if I like it or not (tagged with an "In Process" label in my database). I'm a junkie. Plus there's my wife's collection that she brought into the marriage that I chip away at now and then. Many of these are probably ready to be rated and moved off the "In Process" list but they're so good and I feel that I haven't plumbed their depths completely and I know that if they move off the "In Process" list that they probably won't get the attention they deserve. SOMEONE GET ME AN INTERVENTION!!!
So for no other reason other than I'm a dweeb, here are the albums currently being pumped through my brain:
Phil Solem's (of The Rembrandts) unnamed unreleased solo album (it's quite good!)
Thrush unreleased songs
Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record (how did I manage to evade ELO for all these decades?)
Keane - Under the Iron Sea
Sam Phillips - The Turning
Mark Heard - Stop the Dominoes
scaterd-few - Sin Disease
Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left
George Harrison - Thirty Three & 1/3
Gentle Giant - Octopus
Peter Case - The Man With the Blue Post Modern Fragmented Neo-... Guitar
Aimee Mann - Lost in Space
Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Hoodwinked Soundtrack
Recess Monkey - Field Trip
fun. - Aim & Ignite
Kevin Moore - Ghost Book
Neal Morse - Sola Scriptura
Of course I've paid the record companies for each of these.
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