another thing...

they're predicting 20' surf at the wedge later this week. all south facing beaches are going to have large surf. i might have to go have a look.

scratch that

well, fuck me dead. please disregard my last post.

the house is in foreclosure. not because of anything i did, mind you. my dad has a heloc on this place. he hasn't made a payment on it since last october. so, the bofa said enough is enough. understandable, right?

thing is, we didn't find out from him. we found out because wen'l decided to open a piece of mail marked "resident". i never open that shit. it's how we found out about this foreclosure. my dad probably wouldn't have told us about it until we had a week to be out of here, and i'd have kept paying the goddamned mortgage in the meantime.

the real kicker, however, is this - he's declared bankruptcy. he had to borrow the money from my brother to do it. my mother left him about $400k when she died, three years ago today. add the aforementioned heloc, and he's burned through approximately $450k in those three years, plus fuck knows how much more debt that i have no idea about. she also left him the sole owner of this house, which at the time she died probably would have sold for about $600k. if he'd sold it then, and he knew he was going to move to michigan before she died probably, he'd have walked with about $350k.

i praise the fsm that i didn't get his head for $. my brother got a wee bit of his impulsiveness, but it hasn't cost him anything, really. and i definitely didn't get it. i drive a 13 year old car with 134,000 miles on it. i've babied it its whole life, and *knocking wood* i'll get a few more years out of it. i'd like to pay cash for my next car, or at least have a huge down payment and get the thing paid off in like 2 years.

the bankruptcy could potentially buy us some more time in this house. i need to somehow impress it upon my father that he needs to let things drag out a bit. it could potentially be a year (well, a year from 06.29.09 anyway), with me paying no mortgage. i'd be sitting on a pile from that. moving would be painless and i'd have a nice rainy day fund AND a high def tv. so keep your fingers crossed, k?

speaking of electronics, wen'l cashed in his cisco rewards points on a ps3. :D not even all of them, actually. the next "purchase" will be a nikon digital slr. i cannot wait.

another round of home improvement

so i've decided to undertake some projects around the house. i don't even own this dump and lord the work i've done on it! anyway, i'm going to paint the bedroom. the amount of light that room gets is just insane for most of the day, and while the room is pretty small, i'm going dark on the walls. i mean really dark. i bought paint today. a valspar color called *crucible*. i'm hoping that it will suck up all the light in that room and make it easier to be in there. plus, it'll look really rich on the walls. i love what dark, zero sheen paint looks like.

i'll get that done this week, and then next weekend i'll get the trim and ceiling (and closet! it needs it bad!) done.

and then even more painting!

lately

so i've been listening to a lot of oingo boingo lately."wild sex (in the working class)" is probably my favorite tune. oddly enough, i was really into them right from the beginning. i don't know how many of you out there (all 3 of you... lol) are aware of a radio station here in LA called KROQ. well, back in the day it fucking ROCKED. the police, r.e.m., u2, i can't tell you all the bands i heard for the first time on KROQ.

anyway, back to the mystic knights of the oingo boingo... i think my introduction to them was around 1980. it was party music. some of it was a larf riot. the thing that strikes me now is how well-crafted a shitload of these tunes were. plus, they had a horn section and broke out the xylophone on many occasions. those things alone make them totally kick-ass.

what got me in this frame of mind was hearing them during the fade to commercial on mike malloy's radio show. i was on my way home from target, and there it was. so i came home and dug out the cd. i probably hadn't touched it even since the last time i took all the cd's out of their holders and cleaned them. (i really should take a pic of this thing on the wall behind me... ikea's dirigent, and they don't make it anymore, the fucking bastards!) anyhoo, it makes me think i should rip everything i own and get rid of the hard copies. *lol*

"and i may be greasing the wheels in a noisy factory
oh, i may be hunched over metal machines
watching the gears as they move
just reminds me of bodies in motion
the sweat and the sound"

- "wild sex (in the working class)", oingo boingo

so now i'm listening to orbital. i like the cadence of this song for typing.

i think i'm going to tell wen'l to start leaving the guitar here during the day. i think i am going to give it a try too. even though i'll be forced to keep my fingernails short, which in my case is no small feat. i guess i should be glad that my circulation is so good, eh? i use my fingers a lot, and my fingernails grow wicked fast. like, they're practically to the quick right now. in about 10 days, they'd be a quarter inch past the ends of my fingers. to keep them this short, i gotta file them every couple days.

but, my brain needs a challenge, and i can't afford rosetta stone at the moment.