rule of threes

this is not a good week for pop culture: monday, jon and kate (+ 8) filed for divorce, wednesday ed mcmahon died, and then yesterday both farrah fawcett and michael jackson died. plus, somewhere in the middle, the south carolina governor went missing, his people said he was hiking the appalachian trail, his car was discovered at the airport in atlanta, he came back and said, "oh i just needed an exotic getaway so i decided to pop down to buenos aires," and the next day he not so shockingly admitted an affair. not really pop culture, but definitely a crazy series of events.

here's what makes me sad about this week:
1. jon and kate's divorce. i briefly tivo-ed their show a year ago, but i found her grating and the show disingenuous and i cancelled - so it's not an attachment to the show that makes me sad. (although apparently they're still planning on keeping the show going, just one of them with the kids at a time. that's ridiculous! you're not jonandkate+8 anymore! move on.) it's sad to me that they got divorced because i don't like divorce, and i don't think that they are getting divorced for a "good" reason. i have no idea whether or not either of them cheated, but regardless of what did or didn't happen between jon or kate and anyone else, they both checked out of their marriage the minute they signed their first contract with tlc. honestly, i don't think that you can be a "normal" family and keep a strong marriage when you have tv cameras constantly surrounding you. marriage is hard work - it's work as a couple with no kids, and i can only imagine it's even more work when you have 8 kids. you need privacy and intimate family times to build a relationship. i firmly believe that marriage and family need to come before celebrity, and it makes me sad that a) they chose celebrity, and b) we live in a culture where that's okay. if you're going to be married, be fully committed to it, and take personal responsibility for that commitment.

2. the south carolina governor's disappearance and affair - primarily because it's an affair, and that simultaneously makes me sad and mad. as i was reading an article about it, though, i saw that his wife has known about the affair for the last 6 months .... and yet it was still going on! today on cnn, she's saying that his career isn't a concern of her's and that she's more concerned about the character of her children. ummm, except that you knew he was having an affair, he kept doing it, and you stayed. if he has an affair, you both talk it out, he stops, and you stay, by all means, terrific. but you're basically condoning his action with your lack of action at that point. that's sure character building for your kids. not to mention that when your husband used s. carolina's money to disappear to argentina for a week over father's day, he didn't leave anyone in charge of the state. you're providing a terrific role model for your family. on the flip side, his wife has known about his affair for 6 months and he's enough of a self-centered jerk to keep doing it?? for real? and he thought he had any shot at being in the 2012 presidential election? that is so going to come out, hello! and how narcissistic are you that you thought you could ditch your job for a week, fly to argentina to be with your lover, and that no one would notice? well played, you now have the entirety of america noticing, mark sanford.

relatedly, i know that in countries such as france, where president sarkozy has been married several (3?) times and in fact is currently married to the chick he had been having an affair with, adultery isn't a huge deal in politics. i do think it is a huge deal, though, and should be - and not just because morally and ethically i think cheating on your spouse is awful. a few months ago, my coworker and i were speculating on whether we thought any of the execs in our company have ever had an affair, and we decided that no, we don't think any of them have. as we were talking about it, she made the point that the kind of person you are in a relationship is the kind of person you are in business - if you can't be trusted in a marriage, you can't be trusted in business either. cheating in a marriage shows a general disregard for morality, a lack of commitment, a propensity for lying, etc - why would you want to be in business with someone like that? i very much agree with that sentiment, and i think it applies to politics as well. i want someone leading my state and my country who is commited to doing the job right, has a strong sense of ethics, is honest, etc. do people make mistakes? absolutely. but i think by continuing to have an affair 6 months after his wife found out, mark sanford showed pretty clearly that he didn't think his affair was a mistake, and that he has a pretty strong propensity for lying and a disregard for both general ethics and anyone but himself. rant over.

(sorry, i've been pondering the nature of affairs and divorce quite a bit lately - one downside to facebook is that you notice when people you went to high school with change their status from "married" to "single", and that makes me really really sad. i know it should make me thankful that i have a wonderful husband and a solid marriage, and i am, but i'm just so sad for people who don't.)

3. ed mcmahon, farrah fawcett, and michael jackson dying. i think i'm a little young to remember the heyday of, well, any of their careers - i know ed mcmahon from the publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes, farrah fawcett from charlie's angels reruns during the summers growing up, and michael jackson from the tail end of his pop career, singing beat it in music class in 4th grade, and his crazy neverland ranch/marriage/child molestation drama in the 90s. the thing is, though, that them dying represents the ending of an era. who knows if my kids will even know who ed mcmahon and farrah fawcett are, and someday when i'm rockin out to billie jean or smooth criminal, they will look at me like i'm nuts - likely in much the same way that i look at people who listen to the all-elvis station on satellite radio. the three of them are just pop culture icons from my childhood, and it makes me feel a little bit old that they're dead.

itchy

one downside to camping is the mosquitos, especially since i am more allergic to bug bites than the average joe (no, i'm not just being a wuss - i really am). i brought bug repellant with me, but totally failed to use it, and now have big itchy swollen welts on my legs as a reminder for me in the future. i just counted, and i only have 9 bites total on both legs, but good heavens it feels like a few dozen at the least. one at the top of my right calf was swollen to the size of a quarter yesterday, and i have enough on my ankles that every time i walk, the movement of the skin sends itchy hurty feelings all down the tops of my feet and up my legs. grrrrr. scott very sweetly asked me last night if there was anything he could do, and i asked if he'd be willing to do a below-the-knee amputation for me. he didn't go for it. i think they're getting better today, though - the swelling's all down, and they don't feel burning hot anymore.

our friend miranda (we went to telluride with her and her husband jordan) is an ecologist, and was telling us about a study she saw that concluded that mosquitos only purpose in the whole circle of life is to keep humans in check. i'd say that's about right.

a new take on political corruption

the freakonomics blog just sent me this op-ed piece from the washington post that i thought was far too interesting to not share. it's a great mix of cognitive psych, statistics, and political science analysis. it's like political csi!

The Devil Is in the Digits

By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco / Saturday, June 20, 2009; 12:02 AM

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.
We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.
Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.

welcome to colorful colorado! (western slope edition)

i am now firmly of the opinion that seeing the western slope in colorado should be on everyone's bucket list. we roadtripped to the bluegrass festival over in telluride, and holy cow, this is one beautiful state. big (7 hours to do a diagonal in the middle of the state), but beautiful. i spent a fair amount of the 7 hours each way with my camera in my lap, snapping pictures through the car window - i'll hopefully get them uploaded this week.

brief recap of the trip: stopped in frisco for early dinner at the bbq challenge (i was meat-ed out after like 4 samples and had to get some lemonade and mini-donuts to recover), tried to figure out which 14er was which while driving down hwy 24, ran across a whitewater rafting competition in salida, enjoyed some completely gorgeous scenery, put up our tent after midnight both friday and saturday nights, played spades for approximately 6 hours on saturday while listening to bluegrass (and actually really enjoyed a few of the bands), got rained on twice at the festival, categorized the hippies (dirty hippies, aging hippies, crazy hippies, etc) and got very tired of the smell of second hand pot, rode a gondola in pitch darkness with white aspen trunks looking like bones around us and an amazing view of the stars above, almost got to see the black canyon of the gunnison on the drive home but didn't because they charge $15 admission and we only wanted a 5-minute peek. plus lots of great conversation in the car in the middle. whew.

anyway, it was loads of fun, and having driven through the western slope, i think everyone else should do it too. especially hwy 50 between salida and montrose - wow. the front range mountains are beautiful, for sure, but they're all lodgepole pine and aspen. the western slope has some great rolling ranch land with sagebrush hills and gambel oak valleys, and mountains of spruce and ponderosa and fir mixed in with plenty of big deciduous trees. plus rivers and creeks and reservoirs and canyons. it's pretty fabulous.

i'm a happy camper

we're heading off tomorrow for camping and the bluegrass festival in telluride! i should be packing right now (so that i can do other things with my morning off tomorrow, like run errands or contact paper my shelves), but i'm sleepy and debating whether i should just go to bed - so instead i'm compromising and blogging. what?

i'm excited - we haven't gone camping in two years, but we did a trial run on putting our tent up and it went very smoothly. which is odd because we couldn't figure it out for the life of us last time and spent a weekend sleeping in a lopsided, slightly caved-in tent. i remember waking up in the middle of the night with claustrophobia because scott was breathing straight onto my face, so all i was getting was his carbon dioxide and very little oxygen, and the tent had sagged to just a few inches over our heads. and we didn't know how to put the rain cover up properly, so the sides of our tent were soggy. i think it'll go much better this time, though. we'll even get access to a shower the first night!

okay, i'm yawning, so i'm going to go haphazardly pick out clothes for camping that i'll probably just switch out in the morning anyway. it's remarkably hard trying to pick out clothes for a camping trip that's actually centered around another event. normal camping, we'd be doing hiking the next day so i'd pack scrubby clothes and big hiking shoes and a sweatshirt. but since we'll spend all day at a bluegrass fest, i want to be appropriate for all weather possibilities (30% chance of rain at the moment), comfortable, but still cute enough that i won't be ashamed to see pictures of myself later. flops or tennis shoes or hikers? jeans or shorts or comfy black yoga pants? cardigan or fleece or tshirt? supercomfy sports bra or one that doesn't give me uniboob? see? too many options.

contingency

i think i need to be better about planning for contingencies. i had this beautiful vision of spending the weekend painting, and having the bathroom completely done in time for scott to get home on sunday. fyi, it's now thursday, and still not done. i will attribute that to three things: 1) i lazed around in bed far too long on saturday morning, meaning i had to paint the walls on sunday rather than saturday, which took a big chunk of the day. 2) we had every size drill bit except 3/32" which i needed to drill holes for the new hinges - scott bought a new one on monday, but it had the wrong base, so we had to go back to the store on tuesday. 3) contact paper is a lot harder to install properly than you'd think.

while at walmart the other day buying wall paint, i decided to check out the contact paper aisle so that i could line the drawers in the vanity (and the floor of the vanity cabinet, and the inside of the medicine cabinet - the outside of the vanity etc is real wood and at some point was a nice honey oak color, but the inside is all dark faux-wood laminate). i found this perfect contact paper - it has a classic but slightly organic style, and is white and the exact shade of light gray i painted the walls! i'm very glad that stuff is re-stickable, but goodness, it's hard to get up! if your angle is off a little bit, you suddenly have a huge gap on one end, and the paper keeps sticking together and creating creases or bubbles. oy. i was just doing the medicine cabinet last night, and eventually decided to just do the sides and the shelves - doing the back was just way too much work. i'm not sure if scott will let me do any more contact papering tonight (it's supposed to be our date night, so we're going for a bike ride and watching the last few episodes of lost), but next up is lining the drawers and the floor of the vanity cabinet, which i hope will be easier. fingers crossed.

anyway, realistically, i'm maybe 80% done? finish the lining, screw the doors and drawer fronts back on, nail in the baseboards, reinstall the tp holder and shelf, install the hand towel ring and towel bar, switch out the toilet seat ... i think that's it. most of those shouldn't take too long, it's just a matter of getting them done. this is why scott is a manager and i'm not - i can visualize the whole project and think about the big things that need to happen, but i need scott to remind me about the details, otherwise i just assume that they'll happen and forget about planning for them.

either way, i'm close! and i'll definitely have the bathroom up and ready by the time my parents get here next week, which is what i was hoping for anyway.

sold!

erma is sold! i honestly had no idea she would go that fast, wow. craigslist is awesome! i felt a little bad because a guy ended up calling me right at 5, was at our house at 5:45, and we had agreed to sell him the car by 6:10 while the nice guy that called this afternoon was still on his way over, but there's nothing we could have done about it. i had even called the first guy on my way home to let him know there was another person coming to take a look, but he just wasn't here and the other guy was. that's craigslist for you. in the end i had to let scott make the decision, because i just felt way too emotionally invested in it - i'm afraid of hurting people's feelings, whereas his attitude is more "this person is here, has cash, and wants the car - let's just do it".

the person who bought erma took her for $700, which is obviously not much, but still more than we thought we might get. scott asked if i was going to take him out to a nice dinner, but no - i'm going to deposit it first thing in the morning and get it transferred back into savings, to help replenish the account since we sort of borrowed from our emergency fund to buy wally. (sorry, dave ramsey.)

for sale

aha! i found the camera - in wally's back seat, where scott had stashed it for the road trip. that makes sense. i think i'll be able to get the bathroom finished up tonight, and if so, i'll take pictures and get them posted. i'm debating putting a clear coat of varnish over the white paint to seal it up, since i felt like my fingernails were nicking the finish already when i was putting new knobs on last night - in which case, it'd probably be tomorrow night that i get the bathroom reassembled and cleaned.

i finally got erma posted on craigslist - we're asking $950 obo, which is a bummer because bluebook would have been about $2500 if it weren't for the engine knock. i think we're willing to go down to about $600 (shhh, don't tell), below which we'd just donate her and take the tax deduction. hmm, i just missed a call and the person didn't leave a voicemail (i hate that - i'm not going to call you back unless you leave me a message so i know who you are and that you meant to call me!), but i googled the phone number and it turns out it was from "crazy tommy's" salvage shop. curious!

oh, and in case you're wondering if i still like the forester now that i have it - yes! dave ramsey says not to get "car fever" when looking at newer cars because you'll be happy with your car for the things it lets you do, the time you get to spend with your family, etc, not because it's the fancy car of your dreams. not going to lie, though, the forester is so the car of my dreams, and i love it. every evening when i walk down to my parking garage, i see it sitting there and just smile.

ooh, in the time i've been writing this, i've gotten two more calls - one guy totally tried to hardball me over the phone, which i didn't appreciate (lots of "hmmmmmm, wellllllllll ..." - grr), and then hung up on me when i wasn't playing along, but the other one was really nice and offered $700 if his mechanic uncle approves of it. we shall see!

in process

so i would totally post process-pics of of the bathroom, but i can't find the camera. again. last time i couldn't find it, i hunted the house for a week before telling scott, and he found it in 10 minutes ... so i think i'll wait until he gets home, and then you can just see the finished product.

i had a few snags this morning - i slept in until 8:30, then lazed around in bed reading (melissa nathan's the waitress) for a few hours, so i was getting a late start anyway. i debated running errands first or getting a coat of paint on the ceiling, and had finally landed on doing a coat on the ceiling, but realized i didn't have any fresh rollers. at that point, i figured i may as well get all of my errands done at once, so i ran to walmart, target, and home depot, got home at 2, got out the ceiling paint ... and it was completely gloopy. to the extent that i tried pouring it out, and it came out but maintained the pour pattern rather than smoothing out. i tried to make the best of it and tried rollering it onto a corner of the ceiling, and it was awful - it looked like i was adding a spiky texture! sooo, i went back to walmart for a quart of white.

anyway, i now have two coats on the ceiling, vanity, and bits and pieces. (actually only really one coat on the bits - since they have to lay down to dry, i could only do one side at a time.) so to the best of my recollection, i'm pretty much right on target! church starts at 9:30 tomorrow, so i'm very ambitiously planning on getting up early enough to do something ... i can't decide if i want to do a 3rd coat on the vanity and bits, or if i want to get a first coat onto the walls. maybe the vanity and bits - that way i can tape over them when i'm ready to start on the walls after church and lunch. i should still have plenty of time to get in two coats on the walls in the afternoon. and, if i'm really good, maybe even get some of the bits put back up before scottt gets home!

bachelorette weekend

my father-in-law flew in last night, took us out to dinner (i love it when parents visit!), and he and scott left in wally just after lunch today for omaha and the college world series. by my count, they should be almost out of colorado by now. other than thanking my lucky stars that scott didn't ask me to make the trip to omaha with him - driving through nebraska makes me unbearably cranky - and nervously hoping that wally comes away from the roadtrip unscathed, what am i up to this weekend?

funny you should ask. i just put together a to-do list for myself this morning. let's take a looksee ...

tonight
- hit up the used book sale at the library on my way home
- finish priming the bathroom walls/ceiling/vanity
- prime the bits and pieces if time (the wood shelf, vanity doors, drawer fronts, etc)

saturday
- walmart run to pick up paint and a few bathroom organizing accessories
- home depot to get fresh knobs for the vanity, a new towel ring, and a new toilet seat
- paint the ceiling/vanity/bits and pieces
- paint first coat on the walls
- watch chick flick from redbox (it's rated pg and starring renee zellweger and harry connick jr - how could i not?)

sunday
- lunch with sunday school class after church
- paint walls
- install bits and pieces
- pick up goo from the airport

fingers crossed, i think i just may be able to get the whole master bathroom painted in a weekend! i'm also planning on watching tivo'd reruns of house and hopefully not eating too terribly much junk food. i dream big, don't i?

books to read

this year was the 10-year anniversary of the shootings at columbine. the week of the anniversary, colorado public radio did a big series of interviews with people related to the tragedy; one of the interviews was with dave cullen, whose book columbine was released for the anniversary. i decided to check it out from the library, and after a month and a half on the wait list for it finally picked up my copy last week: it's good. dave cullen is a journalist who began covering the story the morning of the shootings, and uses the book to do an in depth exploration of the day of the shootings, dylan and eric's motivations and experiences leading up to april 20, and the fallout for the media, the sheriff's department, and for the families and survivors after the fact. it's intense, for sure, but well worth it - one of the quotes on the back of the book equates it with capote's in cold blood, and i'd say that's pretty spot on. one thing i thought was interesting was that he addressed a lot of the myths surrounding the shootings. most of what i remember hearing about columbine was cassie bernall saying yes, the trench coat mafia, and that the killers went bowling (i was a self-absorbed 16 year old living in illinois at the time, forgive me), but apparently most of what the country heard are half-truths that he unpacks over the course of the book. anyway, you should definitely check it out, and be prepared with at least one or two kleenexes nearby.

a book i haven't read yet but have on hold at ye olde library is shaunti feldhahn's for women only. yesterday afternoon, kelly and i were discussing the simple dollar's incredibly sweet tribute to how great his wife is, and she mentioned how some of the things tsd appreciates about his wife are opposite of how she tries to treat her husband. (ie, tsd likes his wife to correct his little mistakes, while kelly tries to overlook mistakes and appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into them.) she recommended the for women only book, which is a relationship book written by a christian author that uses stats and interviews with men as the basis for her suggestions. the part kelly and i were discussing reminded me of the love and respect method that i remember hearing about in grad school - basically, the premise is that women want love and men want respect. anyway, i thought it sounded super interesting, so i'm going to read it. kelly did caution that it's helpful reading it in part with your husband, because every guy is different and the things that may be enlightening regarding some guys is completely inapplicable to yours.

and, if you're in the mood for chick lit, i highly recommend melissa nathan. despite the fact that i love chick flicks, i've always looked down on chick lit - maybe because so much of it is dominated by pink covers starring sassy girls wearing high heels and going out for drinks with strange men. (or at least, that's been my impression ... i honestly don't think i've read any chick lit pre-melissa nathan.) a friend who is very smart and academic and was an english major in college recommended melissa nathan, though, so i figured she couldn't be that awful. plus she gave me two of the books in time for a week i spent completely alone in the office, so i had plenty of time to ease into the idea of reading chick lit. not going to lie, i kind of love melissa nathan and her books. they're fun and funny and non-smutty, and they make for a great lighthearted read.

take responsibility, people!

so ever since the big wall street bailouts began last year, i feel like every group of people has figured out a way to band together and put a collective hand out to the government for their own bailout. first it was the big american car companies (well, chrysler and gm at least), who flew to washington on private jets to say, "we're broke, so sorry, but bailing us out is totally the most patriotic thing you could do." now it's people with student loans wanting a total loan forgiveness program.

i say this as unoffensively as possible ... but whatever happened to personal responsibility?

as i was looking at cars, i spent a fair amount of time on consumer reports trying to figure out what good car makes and models are, and they have a really handy chart that tracks ten years of reliability ratings for every make and model out there. they have a system of dots that range from red to black, with white in the middle - red is excellent, black is poor, white is neutral. anyway, as i was scanning the chart, i realized that the brands like toyota and honda have almost universally red dots next to their cars, with a few whites scattered here and there over the past ten years. subaru, similar - they had some black 5+ years ago, but now it's all red. even ford was mostly white with some red and black here and there. chrysler and gm brands? black. maybe a few whites here and there, but nothing at all in the red range. sorry, but the reason why you're bankrupt is perhaps that you don't make a good product. (i know plenty of people love their chrysler or gm made vehicles, and i don't fault you for that at all.) no, america's not straight capitalist, but we are primarily a capitalist country, and the list time i checked, that meant that consumers are supposed to go get the best product they can for their money, regardless of where it comes from. i love america, but if japanese cars are far and away a better product, i'll be buying japanese cars until american car companies bring their standards up and stop relying on people to buy their cars out of a misplaced sense of patriotism. (plus, japanese car companies employ plenty of americans in factories and dealerships, so i am still supporting american workers.)

with student loans, i'm sorry, but i feel similarly: you got the student loans, you need to pay them off. if you're in financial hardship, the companies are usually willing to work with you and put the loan into deferment until you're able to pay. be responsible on the front side - if you know your life's dream is to be a kindergarten teacher, don't go to a school that you'll have to take out $100,000 worth of loans to graduate from. there are always other options, even if they aren't as glamorous. part of being an adult is learning to sacrifice and make good choices. don't lease the new car, the flat panel tv, and the $150 jeans if doing so means that your budget is then too tight to fit in both groceries and a student loan payment. the article quotes an author midway through, "If students are given carte blanche on borrowing now, how will they learn to budget, save and borrow within their means when it comes to a mortgage? 'That's the whole reason of going to school," she says, "not to avoid debt, but to get a job that enables you to pay it off.'"

i know i'm in a pretty great situation right now, being a fiscally responsible adult who loves to budget with a supportive, equally fiscally responsible husband, both of us working, no health problems, and no kids. but i love knowing that i have a solid 6-month emergency fund that i worked hard to put together, i love the feeling of sending a $1500 payment off to citibank to pay down the principle on my student loans, i love examining our spending and finding ways to cut back, i love planning ahead and figuring out how long it'll be til i'm debt free. i even love paying my taxes, but i really think there are far better ways for my tax dollars to be used than to take the necessity of personal responsibility away from college educated people. or car companies run by very well paid, college educated people.

i am an addict.

i think i have an addiction to mt. dew. seriously. i rarely drink the stuff (mainly because we don't keep soda in the house, so that we don't drink it - same reason we don't keep chips or candy around), but when it's available, i have to drink it. i know that it makes me jittery and unable to sleep if i have it too late in the day, yet i want it anyway because i like the taste of it so much. plus, if we have it around and i don't drink it, scott gets to enjoy all of its lime green glory, and that's just not fair.

haha, scott just got home from swimming, i came upstairs to say hi, he asked how i am and i said, "jittery." he immediately said, "aww, because you had mt. dew, huh." he did it to me, though - he knows my love for the dew, yet he brought home a 2 liter anyway.

putting off cleaning

walden it is! in thinking of names for the forester, i had been circling around trying to find something naturey, or foresty ... i was trying to think of famous forests and thought of the schwarzenwald (black forest) in germany, but felt it too multisyllabic, thought of the word wald (pronounced "vald" auf deutsch) which means "forest" but it was too foreign, thought of thoreau and walden pond in passing through the walt whitman thing, but nothing was sticking. then my dad (i assume the steve is you, dad? i don't think i know any other steves who would read my blog and comment) left the comment: "For a name, how about Walden? Brings to mind Thoreau, Walden Pond, and quiet contemplation. A forest can also be quiet and contemplative. Hmm, isn't "wald" the German word for forest?" yes! perfect! thank you for bringing it all together for me. so, walden it is, wally for short.

other highlights of the weekend ... on friday night we watched "fireproof"! it was actually really good - it certainly had a fair amount of cheesiness, but i thought the story it told made up for that. if nothing else, it did a great job portraying real marriage and how necessary faith is for true reconciliation and growth. scott liked it too, and afterward thanked me for making him watch it. (we watched "the wrestler" a few weeks ago, which i just found very depressing and lacking hope, so scott told me i could pick whatever movie i liked next time around - i said "fireproof", and scott groaned.) i can't guarantee you'll like "fireproof", but if nothing else, i think it gives a good perspective and food for thought. (christianity today has a good review of it here.)

yesterday was some errands in the morning, followed by a lot of yardwork - doing little bits and pieces at a time, it's easy to forget in the meantime quite how much work there is to do ... but there's a lot. especially since i think we'll just have to pull out all of the river rock in the front, pull up the 40 year old weedbarrier, get the area cleaned out, and just start over. we're still debating mulch vs. washing out and reusing the existing rock. i like the look of mulch, but we already have the rock, and if you use wood mulch, you have to remulch every year, which gets pricey. we'll see. i decided yesterday that while the landscape designer gave us a 5-year plan, it'll probably be more like a 10 year plan. also, i decided that we can never move since we will have things here exactly as we like them ... and i'm never doing this much work on a house again. if we have more than 2 kids, they'll just have to share rooms. sorry, future children.

last night, we headed up to boulder to meet scott's good college friend loren and his wife jess for dinner and hanging out. they're full time missionaries with campus crusade in central asia, in ft. collins for the summer to help with some training; it was really fun getting to catch up with them and hear all about life and ministry over there. then this morning was the ground breaking for our church's new building, so the service beforehand was a lot of vision for the church and new people at mission hills sharing what god's been doing in their lives. it was really neat, and very encouraging. we stuck around for the lunch/hang out time after the ground breaking, which ended up being really fun - a lot of our friends were out of town or just left early, so we ended up getting to catch up with several couples that we know but don't see often. it was a good time!

i really need to go work on getting the house cleaned up a little bit ... scott's dad's flying in thursday night for them to start their roadtrip out to omaha (for the college world series) on friday, and i don't think he'd appreciate the current mildewy state of our bathtub. also, our entryway somehow invariably becomes a magnet for stuff, so we probably have 10 pair of shoes scattered around there, plus a few bags, some books, paper towels, and tools from putting in our new wireless doorbell. yikes.

toodles, erma!

i am now the proud owner of a 2008 white subaru forester! c. springs called yesterday around 1 to say that they were only able to get one forester at auction, and it was white, but despite the numerous calls they'd received about their foresters since dropping the price, i was first on the list and thus got first shot at the car if i wanted it. (so glad i called tuesday morning!) i got off of work early, we left the house just before 5, made it to the dealership around 6, took a quick test drive, spent literally 20 minutes signing paperwork, and were on our way back home by 7! it honestly felt mildly anticlimactic to be done so quickly after two weeks of "should we or shouldn't we" followed with "yes!" then "no ..." because cars would get sold or dealers wouldn't negotiate. (plus, white was nowhere near my top pick for a color, since i've driven white vehicles ever since i was 16 and was just so ready for a nice silver or gray or light blue - but hey, it's a forester. no complaints allowed.)

i love my car, though. it drives so smoothly, no hiccups or rattles, all of the windows work, and it accelerates really nicely. it has about 4500 miles left on the bumper to bumper warranty, so we're going to take it in this weekend and get it checked out to make sure everything looks good. and then i'm going to go to best buy and get an auxiliary cable so that i can listen to my ipod in the car - fancy!! oh, and they said that out of the 40 foresters that were at auction, this is the only one that sold under $14k, thus it's the only one they bought. it made us feel extra good about buying, though, knowing that we got the best deal possible. (they did keep the purchase price of $13,994.)

last night after we got home, i had the forester parked in the driveway and asked scott whether i should drive erma or the forester to work today. he gave me a *look* and said, "we just bought you a forester, why would you not drive it?" which is a solid point (and i did), but i feel like it's this cherished toy that i want to keep in the packaging for a few days and just look at and not mess up just yet.

incidentally, i also need to find a name for the forester. i had been toying with the name whit or whitaker (forester = forest whitaker = whitaker = whit), but whenever i think of the name "whit", i think of walt whitman, and when i think of walt whitman, i think of crazy stories about his homosexual exploits. so i'm not so sure about that one. we'll see what i come up with.

good night and good luck

all things considered, this has been a good evening! (and by all things considered, i mean, it's been a good evening despite the fact that i didn't get to go buy a car.) the c. springs dealer called me again as i was leaving work to ask what color of forester i'd like so that they can keep their eyes open at the auction tomorrow - isn't that the nicest thing ever?? even though we haven't purchased with them yet, they have provided such great customer service. i always laugh when i see the goony complimentary letters that people write to small companies that get posted on the company website, but 8 hours into my contact with this dealer, i would totally write one of those letters. (for the record, i told them i'm fine with pretty much any color except for the bright blue as long as the price is the same as the car i was looking at earlier today - they said they'd be priced the same. apparently they had their two foresters listed at $14,500 last week, they weren't selling, but then they dropped the price to $13,994 and they've had a ton of interest! i love subaru's olivey green, or their lighter "newport" blue color, but i'm also happy with silver or dark gray.)

we ended up doing a workout tonight, which was very needed, and felt great! i had sort of finished my workout but scott was still swimming, so i did 10 minutes on the bike and watched some of "i'm a celebrity, get me out of here!" - and it was AWFUL. truly. everyone on the show was just so stinkin prideful and full of themselves. i literally heard the phrases, "don't you know who i AM?" and, "i'm too famous for this!" come out of several peoples' mouths. blaah. i planned to make a margherita pizza when we got home, but i only had half of a roma tomato, so i made a veggie pizza instead - it was amazing! jiffy pizza crust (made with a little extra water), salt, pepper, garlic powder, italian seasoning, olive oil, spinach, tomato, yellow squash, onion, mozzarella, and parmesan, and it was by far one of the best pizzas i've ever made! oh, i guess i did toss a little pre-browned hamburger i had in the fridge on there as well. anyway, i highly recommend it.

or not.

ahem. so the salesman just called me back again and said that they just sold the forester, but there are 40 more at auction this week, so they'll have more in stock by the end of the week and will have them online by friday. i hope they keep the prices as low. so now the plan is that we'll take a look online friday night and hopefully be able to go buy one saturday. my goodness.

c. springs it is!

well, it seems to be working out quite well that the broker in littleton was closed last night - scott called today, and they were completely uninterested in any negotiations. like, they seemed offended that we had even given them a lower offer. (and i'm sure if that had happened in person, i would have been tempted to just say, "oh, okay," and pay asking price.) when i called the c. springs place this morning, they said there was a pending sale on the gray forester, but they'd know by noon today if it was going to go through or not ... the guy called me back just before 12 and said it had fallen through (one of the other salesman's mom was thinking of buying, but didn't want to part with her sports car just yet)! so we're leaving work a little bit early tonight to get down there, give it a test drive, and hopefully buy it! the salesman i spoke with did say that there's no negotiation - but since this is hands down the best price in a hundred-mile radius, i'm a-ok with that.

why you shouldn't close early

i left work a few minutes early today so that scott and i could make it to the car place by their closing time at 6pm - i got to scott's office at 5:44, we discussed negotiation strategy for a minute, and were over at the auto broker's office (which is maybe 1/2 a mile from scott's office) by 5:47pm ... and they were closed. the sign in the window was still on, but the doors were locked, and the lights were all off. which was frustrating, since i was ready to just buy a new car already. (we even walked around the building and waited a few minutes in case someone was in the back.)

however, in talking about it further, i think it may not be all bad. today, i had found three '08 foresters with comparable mileage for $13,9xx down in colorado springs (vs $14,9xx in littleton). two of those cheaper foresters are bright blue (think electrocuted smurf - no, seriously), which i'm not open to buying, but one was dark grey. so scott suggested that we confirm the grey is still available, then call littleton and tell them we'd like to buy from them, but unless they match the price, we'll just go get the same product $1000 cheaper in the springs. as scott pointed out, it's worth three hours of our time for roundtrip travel and $50 of gas to go save $1000. and either way, we're going to make an appointment to guarantee that someone will be there. so, that's the plan for tomorrow!

weekend report.

we had such a fun weekend! saturday, we met up with friends to go biking in frisco and had a fabulous time! we met at a set of parking lots next to the interstate to carpool up, and ended up hanging out there a while so that we could do things like change a bike tube, get gear loaded up, etc. we finally got to frisco in time for lunch (scott and i were in his 4-cylinder, rear-wheel drive truck with four of the bikes while the other two couples were in a 6-cylinder toyota highlander - on the steep inclines going up i-70, with the pedal to the metal, we were going maybe 60mph ... i think they beat us there by 5 minutes, with both of us leaving at the exact same time), had lunch in a park, then hit the bike trail that started right at the park.

we decided to go uphill from frisco to breckinridge, figuring we would go up as far as we could, then turn around and coast back down, which i think was a good plan. we got caught in a hail-storm midway through the ride, which was surprisingly painful! kinley had gotten her little helmet chinstrap stuck on the strap holding her into maura's bike carrier and was freaking out, so we all stopped while they got her untangled. they were in the midst of deciding to turn back when it started to rain, but the rest of us wanted to keep going for a bit, so we headed off and it immediately started to hail. thankfully there was a school building maybe a mile up the trail, so we made it there just in time for the hail to stop, but waited out the rain under shelter of the school. all told, we made it to probably 4 miles from breck, and my legs literally felt like they were dying and i was seriously contemplating camping out and making them get the car to pick me up - the stretch from the school to our stopping point looked flat to the eye, but obviously was just enough up-hill that it was hard on my poor unathletic thighs. anyway, everyone took pity on me and we turned around, and the ride back was fabulous - enough decline that it was mostly easy (i walked my bike up the few steep inclines), with a few really fun fast, steep declines.

after we met up post-ride, we got coffee at a local shop on main street, then found a free disc golf course! we had 5 frisbees for 6 people, so we alternated taking kinley duty so that everyone could play. none of us were good (i was particularly bad - i think my average was 9 throws per hold, and the par was 3-4), but we had a lot of fun. and the view was amazing! the back of the course butted up to lake dillon and there were peeks at of snowcapped mountains everywhere. then it started raining again, so we had an early dinner and went home. my knees were aching by the time we got home (from the biking, i assume), and i was definitely ready for an early bedtime, but it was a super fun day.

last night we had carlos and tatiana (our class's missionary couple from costa rica) over for dinner with some other friends, and had a great time! we knew them a little bit from talking the last time they were in town two years ago, and a little bit of contact since then, but we hadn't really spent any time with them. it was fun hearing all about costa rica and their ministry stuff, and just hanging out with them - they're probably in their early 30s and just very fun and energetic. we played the game 25 words or less after dinner - they were skeptical since obviously their native language is spanish. they're both very fluent in english, though, so they figured they'd give it a whirl; we did guys v. girls, and while the girls of course won, carlos totally carried the guys' team! they invited us to come down to costa rica either on vacation or to bring a missions trip, and it was super tempting - definitely something to think about.

and the obligatory car mention: we took a look online yesterday to see what the prices are on other car models we'd been considering (impreza, legacy, prius, camry, matrix, cr-v ... i think that's all), and it ended up that the cheapest models in the same model year/mileage range were all about the same price as the forester! so, we decided to go ahead with the forester. i'm excited! we'd been planning on going tonight to buy the car we test drove, but the transfer from savings to checking i made on saturday hasn't gone through yet. we're debating going tonight to get the negotiation process started (but since the cash isn't in place yet, i'm not sure how much we can do) vs waiting until tomorrow so we can do it all at once, but obviously risking someone else buying the car we want in the meantime. oh, and with erma, i think we're going to take her in to a mechanic maybe next weekend to get an objective opinion, then try to sell her on craigslist with the obvious disclaimers, and probably end up donating her if that doesn't work. i added 3 qts of oil yesterday (might should have done that earlier ... whoops - she's been burning through oil like nobody's business for the past year or so) yesterday, and she did sound happier at highway speeds on my morning commute today, which made me mildly optimistic.