Get Off My Lawn!

Are movies really getting worse?

/ Shane / 6 Comments

I saw the movie Sherlock Holmes the other day. The new one, with Robert Downey Jr. That sound you hear is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spinning in his grave (to this day, even though the movie came out in 2009).

This movie was so dumb. It physically pained me that they just had to attach the name “Sherlock Holmes” to this otherwise completely unrelated action movie. Seriously, there was nothing in this movie that had anything to do with the Sherlock Holmes mythology as it were; they could have just called it, “Generic Steampunk Action Movie!” and it wouldn’t have changed anything. So I can only assume they invoked Sherlock Holmes to tap into a built-in audience.

So my problems with it are mostly Sherlock Holmes-based. Other than that, it was just sort of your average mindless action movie that just happens to be set in Victorian England. The characters are goofy, the situation is goofy, the whole movie is just generally sort of goofy. (In case you were wondering, Sherlock Holmes is an amazing hand-to-hand fighter who can beat up anybody because he’s so much smarter than everyone!)

But here’s the question: am I just becoming snobby in my old age? Or are movies really just getting worse as time goes on? I tend to think it is a little of both, but probably the former more than the latter. People have probably always been declaring the movie industry is at rock bottom, since right about the dawn of the movie industry.

It seems to me that when I was a kid, I generally liked every movie I saw, more or less. Now it seems like I generally dislike every movie I see. The default has flipped. I think there’s every chance that I probably would have liked this movie when I was a kid. And to be fair, the movie probably wasn’t really marketed at me.

So I don’t really know if it’s just me, or what. What do you think?

The Tiny House Movement

/ Shane / 7 Comments

I have recently become fascinated by the Tiny House Blog, and the tiny house movement in general. It is very, very appealing to me to have a very tiny house (less than 1,000 square feet, but usually around 500 square feet or less). It is total rebellion against the consumerist lifestyle. You cannot have any useless junk laying around, you simply don’t have any room for it.

Oh man, that sounds like heaven.

The more junk I get rid of from my house, the more the rest of it begins to look suspect. Disposable plastic toys. Clothes I haven’t worn in years. Extraneous kitchen appliances. And all of it wrapped in miles and miles of extra trash packaging.

The tiny houses on that blog are great. They come in more varieties than you can imagine: from rustic, to modern, from log cabins, to gypsy wagons. From houses made from old storage containers, to houses made of mud and straw. Some are totally self-sufficient off the grid. Some are on wheels. The only thing in common, is that they are all tiny.

One day I will have a tiny house, mark my words!

Sorry sir, there’s nothing I can do

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Aren’t computers the worst?

As we have become more and more reliant on them, and as they have sort of wormed their way into all sorts of important business functions, they have become infallible gods, whose word is law.

Maybe it’s because I write computer programs every day, so I know how prone they are to error (at least the ones I write! :-P). But then again, doesn’t everybody have experience with crappy computer programs (I mean, come on, the vast majority of us use Windows, right?)

The other day I got a letter from a collection agency. This is not something I see every day, and it caused me quite a bit of panic. It turns out the charge was only $10, but I was still imagining legal action and destroyed credit.

The thing I couldn’t figure out was, how did I not pay this bill? It was from the doctor’s office, and we’ve obviously paid many bills before and after. How could they not get ahold of us in their “repeated attempts”, when every other bill is fine. My wife WORKS there, and they couldn’t get ahold of us?

Something seemed fishy.  For all I know, this company is scamming me for $10! That made more sense to me than there was one bill that they couldn’t get ahold of me for, while we are meanwhile paying all these other bills.

So the first thing I did was call the hospital. I spoke to 2 different billing divisions, and they both agreed I had no balance. Ah ha! Gotcha! So I called the collection agency back. (several times in fact, since their “computer system was down” and they would “call me back later” which they never did) Finally, they verified that it was one of the two billing departments I had spoken to previously.

Me: “But I already spoke to them, and they said I didn’t owe anything.”
Lady: “Well, if that’s the case, then they can email us and we will close the account.”

::sigh:: Very well.

I called the number she gave me and spoke to the same department I spoke to before.

Billing person: “Yes, you do have an outstanding balance, but it’s not with us, it’s with the other billing department.”
Me: “I just got off the phone with the collection agency, and they said it was you. They gave me this number.”
Billing person: “Well I just got off the phone with them and they said it’s the other department.”

Oookay, so I called the original billing office back:

Billing person: “Yes, you do have an outstanding $40 balance”
Me: “…but the collection agency is saying I only owe $10.”
Billing person: “Well, they should be telling you you owe $40.”

Okay, so now my head is starting to spin. First I didn’t owe anything, now suddenly I do. First I owed $10, now I owe $40. And why doesn’t anybody know who I’m supposed to owe money to??

But, of course, nobody knows nothing. It’s just in the computer that way, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Eventually we figured out that my guarantor (billing) address was incorrect (because I asked them to check, not because they suggested it). At some point the patient address had been changed, but the guarantor address had not been updated in the computer. Since Sara is the guarantor for herself and the kids and her guarantor address is correct, all of the other bills had been sent to the right location.

Now here’s the thing. If we can’t question the almighty computer because it is all-knowing and all-wise, then how come it wasn’t smart enough to get ahold of me. Supposedly, they’re trying and trying, doing anything they can to get ahold of me. And yet they never tried the other address they have for me? They never used the phone number? They never looked at the address for my spouse or children? Hit me up for the money when I called to pay a different bill? They never WALKED DOWN THE HALL to where my wife was working? Nope, collection agency.

VERY WELL. We have the root problem identified and fixed, so let me just pay up and be done with it.

Well, the hospital told me to pay the collection agency, but the collection agency couldn’t find any record of the other $30 the hospital said I owed. So then I had to pay $10 to the collection agency and $30 to the hospital.

I wanted confirmations of all of these payments, especially from the hospital, so I didn’t somehow end up double paying when the collection agency finally turned up the bill for the other $30 that they couldn’t find. But when I get the confirmation email from the hospital, MY BILLING ADDRESS IS WRONG.

Back on the phone with them and the lady says, “Ha ha, I can see the address is in there, but she didn’t actually switch it over yet. Maybe she was going to do that later, but I can just do it now.”

I find absolutely nothing funny about this.

If it takes 2 seconds to do, and she could do it while I was on the phone, why didn’t the first lady just do it, instead of saving it for later? And why in the world would I have any faith that it is going to work the second time?

And by the way, the original (wrong) billing address had a typo in the street name to begin with, so even the wrong address was wrong.

So none of this is my fault, of course (nor is it apparently the fault of anybody I spoke to on the phone), but I have to be the one to do all the work to resolve it. Everybody just shrugs and says, “Sorry sir, computer mistake. Nothing we can do about it.” All’s well that ends well, I suppose, and they assured me that this won’t affect my credit. But isn’t it up to the person who wants my money to shoulder some of this burden? Or the collection agency? Or somebody besides me? ANYBODY besides me??

Land Barons

/ Shane / 5 Comments

For quite a while now, Sara and I have been interested in buying a piece of land somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with the intention of setting ourselves up as feudal land barons and seceding from the union to run our own kingdom.

Pursuant to this end, we have been socking away cash and doing all sorts of research into the topic. Both Sara and I are sort of compulsive researches/organizers/spreadsheet makers, so, in a situation like this, we tend to assemble and sort a lot of data in order to be informed or prepared. Finally, we passed the research period, and got to the point where we actually contacted a realtor and started looking at properties.

Sort of the point of all of this is to get some green space somewhere outside of the city where the kids can play and generally enjoy nature. When I was a kid, we owned a little piece of land with a house trailer on it up by Wisconsin Dells, and I have a lot of really good memories of spending time up there. Although we did go into the Dells a lot, the things I really remember are hiking on the land across the street, exploring in the woods, playing with the grasshoppers on the path to my Great Aunt’s property (she had a much nicer outhouse!), visiting the horses next door (and playing with the electric fence!), hearing the bobcats that lived nearby, etc. Basically, just enjoying the experience of being out there. So I think it would be cool if my kids had the same sort of experience.

Perhaps double so, since we didn’t live in a city like Chicago, and we actually had a yard to play in (unlike our kids). In addition, we have gotten into the gardening thing in the past few years, and we’d like to continue that except on a larger scale. Specifically, we would like to have some fruit trees: apples and cherries, perhaps blueberries or raspberries, or other things that we have resorted to going to u-pick places in the past. In fact, Sara has even floated the idea of keeping bees.

The other aspect of this is that we’re taking the extremely long view of things. This is liberating for a couple of reasons. For starters, we are looking at several phases of use for the land: initially camping, followed by some sort of permanent or semi-permanent structure, and ultimately perhaps retiring there. So we want to get a lot of use out of the purchase. Second off, we have time to arrange things to our liking. If we want to plant trees, we can plan to have them grow by the time we want to build something there. If we want fruit trees, we can plant them now, even though we wouldn’t get fruit for a few years.

We do have a few other requirements on the property (did I mention we’ve thought about this a lot?), the main one being we want it to be no more than 2 hours from our house. Basically, we don’t want to create incentive for ourselves not to go. I know how important this is from my experience with the property up at the Dells: when it was only 2 hours away, we went there frequently; when we moved and it was 7 hours away, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to get there.

Okay, so finally it was time to go see some properties. I sort of imagined that we would look at a property and know right away whether we liked it or not. I figured the vast majority of them would be ruled out immediately. Instead what I found was that I liked most of the properties, and it was hard to rule any of them out. It’s like any major purchase, such as a car or a house: there are so many variables, that you can’t really compare things. One might be bigger, while another is better located, while another has better trees, while another is cheaper, etc. How do you rank these things against each other?

I have a concrete example of this. We have seen about 6 properties so far, with many more to see. However, we have seen most of the top of our priority list, so it is likely that we’ve seen some of the best matches already. Of these properties, there are 2 that really separate themselves out, and Sara and I have no idea how you could chose between them (and we both kind of favor opposites!)

Property 1

Pros:

  • This property is absolutely gorgeous. Lots of very old pines, very shady. The soil is very sandy, and if you walk the large cleared trail to the back of the property, it turns into a sand dune. Yes, we could own a sand dune! It would be perfect for camping.
  • It is completely screened from the road, and is pretty much free of underbrush.
  • It is less than 2 miles to lake Michigan.
  • It borders a 40-acre nature preserve on one side, meaning you have no chance of having neighbors on that side, and your property is going to feel 4 times bigger than it is.

Cons:

  • The sandy soil and copious amounts of shade would mean that our apple and cherry trees and big, tomato-filled garden are out of the question. This was one of, if not THE reason we wanted to do this in the first place.
  • On the non-forest preserve side, there is a very, very close neighbor (the property itself is long and narrow).
  • We picked up 2 wood ticks in the very short time we were there. Yikes!

Property 2

Pros:

  • This property is exactly what we had imagined. The front is screened from the road with denser trees, while the back opens up a little and is somewhat free of undergrowth. The property on one side is a horse pasture. They had a pony.
  • It looks perfect for growing fruit trees, etc.
  • One corner of the property borders a 14-mile, state-operated hiking trail.
  • The property is half the price of the other. Depending on negotiation, we might be able to pay cash for it, which is pretty huge, considering how everybody keeps telling us how difficult it is going to be to get a loan for vacant land right now.

Cons:

  • There is no way to get a car onto the land, so we’d have to clear a driveway immediately. I don’t know how much this would cost. Could we rent equipment and do it ourselves? Could we do something temporary, or should we go ahead and get a real driveway put in? Lots of questions.
  • The property is located just outside of a small town that really doesn’t have much going on. Not even a grocery store. Let’s just say this is not the kind of horse you’d want to hitch your cart to.

So, as you can see, it’s sort of hard to compare the two, much less decide which one is better. And of course, there are other considerations, such as the availability of water/electric/perc test, restrictions as to what you can do on the land (i.e. no camping, you have to build within 2 years of buying the land, only giant 2 car garage McMansions allowed, etc.), etc.

So, any suggestions? Advice? For those of you that live in the country, is there anything we haven’t considered? Anybody want to buy one of the two and let us use it occasionally? 🙂

Things that Annoy me, Part III

/ Shane / 2 Comments
Alright, now we’re up to 15 things that annoy me!
  1. If you are dropping kids off at school and you only pull over half way, you might as well not have pulled over. You’re still blocking everybody on the street. We both know it’s a fake effort, so just save the pretense and stop in the middle of the street.
  2. If I’m stopped at a stop sign and a pedestrian is crossing the street on the opposite side, then of course the cross traffic is free to go even though it is not their turn. However, if the cross traffic is trying to turn in the same direction I’m going, then they have to wait for the same person crossing as I do. In that case they are NOT allowed to go out of turn and then just sit in the intersection until the person is finished crossing!
  3. The fact that organic bananas now come wrapped in a plastic bag. The fact that any bananas would be wrapped in something that has to go in the trash is ridiculous. They kind of already come in a pretty handy wrapper. But to wrap specifically the organic bananas in trash is such a slap in the face. Oh, you actually care about your health and the Earth in general? Okay, well here’s some extra trash for the landfill for no reason!
  4. Concepts which are not internally consistent. This is especially true of movies, politicians, and people in their personal lives. If you give me a framework, I am willing to go with it…but don’t then violate the framework. If you tell me a “giant ray” can make a lizard 20 times its size, I’ll buy it. But then it can’t suddenly fly or ignore missiles smashing into its face. Government should stay out of our business and personal lives, or it shouldn’t. We should be religious or we should be debaucherous. None of it matters one way or the other to me, but pick a story and stick to it! You can’t have it both ways. Of course, if you can come up with some cockamimi story about why everything remains internally consistent, then I’m back on board again. Why didn’t you SAY that the giant-ray messes with the neurons in the lizard’s head giving him telekinetic powers??
  5. People who don’t like firm plans. In most cases, these people are known as “people who don’t have kids.” The only way I can get through a day is with a schedule. I have to know when I have to be somewhere, so that I can start getting the kids ready roughly 3 hours before that. When you have kids, you have certain milestones you have to hit (meal times, nap times, bed times, etc.) and those are firm deadlines. And when I hear, “Eh, we’ll just be there whenever”, then I know that means it’s not happening.